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MORE ON TEASER BLOGS….Dave Munger responds to my annoyance with “teaser” blogs, which routinely make you click “continue” to read an entire blog post:

This really depends. I mean, if you’ve got a three-paragraph post, and you’re asking people to click through to read one more paragraph, I agree. But what if you’ve got a post that’s 8 or 10 paragraphs long? Or what if you’re embedding some bandwidth-heavy content? Most people aren’t going to click through, so this can save a lot of bandwidth. Yes, I’m biased, because that’s what CogDaily does, but at least you know now why we do it.

FWIW, I don’t have a problem with this. My problem is mostly with blogs that do this routinely and for no very good reason. I already mentioned Felix Salmon’s blog, and others in the original thread called out Josh Marshall and the Firedoglake crew. Basically, it’s a real pain in the butt to have to click “continue” constantly just to finish up a blog post, and there’s no question that it reduces my reading of blogs that do this.

But I don’t have any problem with doing it for a reason. Occasional long posts, especially ones that have a limited audience, are fine candidates for this treatment. Putting spoilers below the fold is fine. I’m not quite sure what kind of content would be so bandwidth heavy that this would be a good excuse, but I suppose this works too. And doing what CogDaily often does, which is to summarize a new piece of research in enough detail to let you know if you might be interested in reading the gory details, and then putting said details below the fold — that’s fine too.

But my plea is to use some discretion here. Actually, use a lot of discretion. 600 words isn’t that much, and there’s no need to cut a post that long in half. Spoilers are uncommon unless you’re running a movie review site. And scrolling past a post you aren’t interested in only takes one or two seconds. So please: do this sparingly. The world will be a better place for 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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