Dan Gilmartin

Dan Gilmartin, executive director and CEO of the Michigan Municipal League.

- Dan Gilmartin explains this month’s show. (51 seconds)

Nancy Kaffer

Nancy Kaffer is an award-winning reporter and columnist at the Detroit Free Press. She also wrote for Crain’s Detroit Business. Her work has taken her across the country from Michigan to Mississippi. Nancy writes about politics in Detroit and Wayne County. She discusses investment in the city and efforts to attract and retain residents, and other challenges facing our state.

- Nancy Kaffer discusses a column she wrote looking at an L.A. Times piece about Detroit and other national media coverage on the Motor City. (7:16)

Sean Rhiney

Sean Rhiney is the Director of the Eigel Center for Community-Engaged Learning at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has spent ten years in higher education with a focus on nonprofit and public interest partnerships. He is a lawyer and former managing editor of Model D’s sister publication in Cincinnati, Soapbox. He recently contributed to a piece for Soapbox highlighting a journey thought leaders from Cincinnati and Detroit made to each other’s city.

- Sean Rhiney was particularly impressed with the feeling of optimism that he saw in Detroit during a recent visit to Michigan. (9:49)

Jeffrey Brown

In a career spanning more than twenty years at the NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served in a variety of roles, both on and off camera. As senior correspondent, he's conducted studio discussions and reported from the field on a wide array of domestic and international stories, and now regularly co-anchors the nightly news program. As arts correspondent, he's profiled and interviewed many of the world's leading writers, musicians and other artists. As senior producer for national affairs for more than a decade, he helped shape the program's coverage of a range of areas, including the economy, healthcare, social policy, culture and the arts.

Brown discusses a story he recently produced on Detroit residents working together to restore hope to the city.

- Jeffrey Brown said the Detroit story has been told from many different angles and his goal was to take a new, fresh approach for his piece so he focused on the renewed energy taking place. (10:14)

Sarah Hulett

Sarah Hulett became Michigan Radio's assistant news director in August 2011. For five years she was the station's Detroit reporter, and contributed to several reporting projects that won state and national awards. Sarah considers Detroit to be a perfect laboratory for great radio stories, because of its energy, its struggles, and its unique place in America's industrial and cultural landscape.

Sarah discusses one of her recent stories about Detroit that aired across the United States on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition program.

- Sarah Hulett’s piece that went national focused on billionaire Dan Gilbert’s purchase of dozens of Detroit buildings. She explains there’s a hunger in the national media for underdog-type stories like what is happening in Detroit. (9:41)