September 4, 2008

Rudy’s Ego

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RUDY’S EGO….Jonathan Martin confirms what I suspected while I was watching Rudy Giuliani’s frequently off-script jeers last night:

These extemporaneous comments, many of which drew huge applause, made the former New York mayor’s speech run much longer than planned. So much so, that a convention-planner confirms that they had to scrap a planned video ahead of Palin’s speech.

If I were in charge of the convention I would be seriously pissed off at Giuliani for this. Sure, he brought the convention hall crowd to its feet, but I’ll bet his over-the-top mockery didn’t play very well with the home audience. Conversely, the folks at home love those biographical videos. They’re really very effective. If they had to ditch Palin’s video because Giuliani was busy milking the adulation of the crowd and boosting his future speaking fees, it might end up costing them a close state or two. You never know. And all to feed hizzoner’s titanic ego.

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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.

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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.

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