January 29, 2013

Am I the Only Person Left Who Hates Anti-Aliasing?

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I’m not trying to pick on the New Republic here, but I’m curious about something. They launched a redesigned website yesterday, and here’s how the main text font renders on my PC:

Why does it look so bad? Because I’m running Windows with ClearType turned off. Does anyone else do this, or am I the only person left on the planet who finds ClearType intolerable for day-to-day use? If I’m the only one, then I understand why some magazines don’t bother optimizing their body fonts for either mode (it’s not just TNR). But if I’m not the only one, then why not use a font that works for everyone?

PREEMPTIVE TECH NOTE: Yes, my monitor is running at its native resolution. Yes, I know how to set up ClearType. Yes, I know that most people prefer the mushy look of anti-aliased type. But I don’t, and never have. I’m just curious about whether I’m a lone holdout at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if I am. ClearType has been turned on by default in Windows for many years now, and my guess is that very few people these days realize it’s something they could turn off even if they wanted to.

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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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