April 11, 2012

MoJo and the Magnum Foundation Join Forces to Showcase Documentary Photography

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It’s with exceptional excitement that I can finally squawk about the Mother Jones/Magnum Foundation partnership. This is a big step towards building out the awesome photojournalism and documentary photography for which Mother Jones has become known, to our website.

In partnering with the Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund, Mother Jones will be showcasing 10 photo essays through the year, giving a platform to projects documenting underreported stories from around the world. It’s a partnership that makes sense: the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund helps photographers complete documentary work that may otherwise not see completion. And upon completion, Mother Jones helps give an audience to the work.

Karen Mirzoyan shot our first project, The Unrecognized Islands of Caucasus, an appropriately complex project that examines the tangle of unrecognized lands in the Caucasus region. Mirzoyan’s work goes beyond straight, expected documentary photography, which he smartly realized wouldn’t do justice to such a complicated region, to a story with so many contours. The photography varies in tone and style to match the chapter of the story being told. Mirzoyan incorporates pieces of his notebooks he kept while working on the project. It’s a very intimate look at the people of the Caucasus, their relationship to their homeland — and to each other. Really, it’s an amazing body of work. It’s exciting to get to run it on MotherJones.com.

We will be bringing a new photo essay from the Magnum Foundation partnership to MotherJones.com each month. And we will be running at least one Emergency Fund project in print. My heart still lies with the printed page, so for me, that’s an important component of this partnership. Thanks for taking a look. This is just one step to help expand our commitment to documentary photography. We hope you enjoy it.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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