Introducing Impeachapalooza, a Very Smart & Very Legal Staff Blog

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Welcome to a fun Mother Jones experiment straight out of the early aughts! We’re bringing blogs back.

The coroner’s report on blogging goes something like this: After disrupting everything and changing the world forever, blogs were professionalized and incorporated into publishing outlets, and the things that defined them—voice, analysis, obsessiveness—became standard for writing on the internet. Blogs won, and died. The epistolary back-and-forth of blogging moved largely to social media, and by the time Mother Jones removed most of our blogs from our site in 2016, they really were basically just a vestigial button in our CMS. 

But tellingly, we actually didn’t get rid of all of them. Kevin Drum’s blog remained because his readers—our most loyal—had a relationship with him that dated back to his time before joining our magazine. And that meant something and it means something still. The world has changed a lot since 2016, both the publishing world and the world at large. The way we interact with our readers, the way we interact with each other, the way we want to cover the news, has all evolved. 

Impeachapalooza, a new blog by the staff of Mother Jones about the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, was created in the spirit of those blogs of old. It will be a place where the various developments of the day are conveyed, discussed, analyzed, raged at, and laughed about by reporters and editors. There will be half-baked thoughts and over-baked thoughts and silly thoughts. There will be dumb thoughts and smart thoughts and tall thoughts and short thoughts and thoughts in the rain and thoughts on a train, and then at the end of everything, right at the last, if I wish upon a wish and hope beyond hope it will help us answer such questions as “What the hell just happened?” and “What did Giuliani just say?” and “Wait, which one’s Yovanovitch again?”

And who knows! Maybe the real impeachment is the friends we’ll make along the way.

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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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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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