April 20, 2009

The Vlogger MoJo and Maddow Love

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If you watched The Rachel Maddow Show last Friday, you may have caught vlogger Jonathan Mann performing his cheeky tune “Hey Paul Krugman.” Mann’s Rock Cookie Bottom website, where he posts an original music video every day, has more than just Maddow buzzing. Want to know more? Check out MoJo’s podcast interview with Mann (excerpt after the jump).

Mother Jones: Were you surprised by the success (of the Krugman video), and can you explain what that led to?

Jonathan Mann: So the Paul Krugman song was number 77, and to me it was no different than 76 or 78. It was just another song. It was literally how I was feeling at the moment. I was like reading Paul Krugman’s blog, listening to Tim Geithner, and thinking to myself, man I really wish that Paul Krugman, who when he speaks makes perfect sense to me, was actually calling shots…The song just blew up. I think the first blog to get it was this one called Calculated Risk, and from there it went to the Huffington Post, on the front page, and from there it just totally blew up on the internet. It ultimately led to an appearance on this show called 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on MSNBC, where the host David Schuster is apparently this huge fan of mine. So I wrote them this song and all this stuff, so it’s been pretty nuts.

Listen to MoJo’s full podcast interview with Jonathan Mann here.

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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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