September 9, 2015

Perhaps It’s Time to Calm Down Over Apple’s Annual Product Fest

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I guess everyone knows I’m not an Apple fanboy, but I’ve still got to ask: how long can Apple keep the press corps salivating every time they stage a product announcement? Today’s is being followed with the usual breathless real-time tweeting and front-page liveblogging, but what did Apple actually unveil? A modestly upgraded iPhone. An iPad with a bigger screen. And an Apple TV box with Siri and some new apps.

These are all perfectly serviceable upgrades. They’ll probably be popular. But really, it’s pretty unremarkable stuff. Is it really still worth covering these PR events as if Apple is revolutionizing the world?

POSTSCRIPT: Aside from Apple’s expertise at showmanship, part of the reason for this is probably demographic. A few years ago I attended a meeting of 30 or 40 people from left-leaning media outlets. About 20 of them had laptops out, and of those, 17 were MacBooks. Apple products are insanely popular among a small slice of urbanish/liberalish journalists, and I suspect this leads them to believe that their readers are equally entranced by Apple news. And maybe they are! But I have my doubts.

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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.

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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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