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Responding to a recent New York Times piece about the demise of voice mail, Matt Yglesias says, “If you leave a message on my office voicemail, forget about it. I’m not even entirely sure I know how to check it.” James Joyner agrees: “I often forget to check my voice mail for days on end and my wife simply won’t check a message, preferring to return any missed calls that show up on her mobile.”  And Andrew Sullivan warns us: “I check my voice mail once a week. Just so you know.”

I’ve never had quite the aversion to voice mail that these folks do1, but still, I understand.  Death to voice mail.  One thing, though: I hope everyone who hates voice mail at least records an outgoing message warning callers that a callback is unlikely and providing some other way of getting in touch.  It’s one thing not to like voice mail, but it’s quite another to have it on your phone and then just leave people hanging wondering why they never heard back from you.

1True story: I once wrote a remarkably full-featured piece of Windows software solely to keep track of voice mail at work.  It started out as a project to teach myself SQL programming and sort of mushroomed from there.  What a waste.  But it was fun at the time.

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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.

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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.

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