Friday Cat Blogging – 7 May 2010

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Back in 2004, Inkblot got his shot at fame when the New York Times decided to write a story about him. Seriously. Here it is. I still use that picture on my Facebook page.

But time marches on, and Twitter has replaced blogs as the hot new social media. And the star of Twitter isn’t Inkblot, it’s Sockington, profiled this week in People magazine. Inkblot gets a few thousand followers via this blog, but Socks gets 1.5 million followers via Twitter. As you can see below, that makes Inkblot melancholy. Over on the left, he’s practically given up at the thought of matching Socks’ fan base. It’s just too daunting a task what with sunny weather beckoning in the backyard. To make it worse, his amanuensis, unlike Jason Scott, is an aggressively non-clever human who has no chance of creating an Inkblot Twitter feed that would draw even 1.5 thousand followers, let alone millions. Very sad. Domino, on the other hand, thinks Inkblot already gets too much attention and is showing off her bathing abilities this week for your approval. I swear, Domino is the loudest, lickiest cat in the world. She keeps Marian up for at least ten minutes every night by hopping onto her pillow at bedtime and proceeding to give herself an extremely slurpy, extremely thorough bath. It’s an experience not to be missed. 

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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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