Friday Cat Blogging – 5 March 2010

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Today we have twin cats. On the left, Domino found a patch of sunshine this morning, fell asleep, and then discovered that it was half gone when she woke up. On the right, Inkblot, instead of chasing Domino away and usurping her sunny patch, ambled upstairs to find his own piece of sunshine. But the same thing happened to him. The sun gods are fickle that way.

And now a request from the cat gods. As some of you know, MoJo emails out a weekly newsletter that includes the best of this blog for the week plus a brand new post exclusive to the newsletter plus a cat of the week from one of my readers. (You can sign up for it over on the right, a little ways down the page.) However, our stock of cat photos has run dry. So if you’d like to show off your favorite feline to the world, email a picture of your cat(s) to motherjonescats@gmail.com. Be sure to include names, ages, and whatever other tidbits strike your fancy. It’ll show up in a newsletter soon. Thanks!

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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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