Today’s photo is more of a curiosity than anything else. I was out walking a few days ago and passed by a spot that often has some hummingbird activity. I wasn’t really planning to take any hummingbird picture, but I went ahead and changed the camera settings anyway in case one showed up. And one did. I aimed the camera and reeled off a couple of dozen shots in burst mode.

But when I got home I saw that none of them were any good. The autofocus wasn’t set right, so the bird was fuzzy in every shot. But then I looked again and was sort of intrigued by one of them. The background was pure white, and the foreground flower was in sharp focus. With a bit of photoshopping I amped up the color of the flower a bit and turned the hummingbird into more of a silhouette.

And then I stared at it. Is there really anything interesting about this shot after all? Or is it just a routine addition to the discard pile? I’m not sure, though I’m leaning toward the latter.

September 26, 2018 — Irvine, California

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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.

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