Today’s photo has been three years in the making. It’s a picture of a double-crested cormorant.

Now, cormorants are pretty common around here, so you might wonder just what took so long. The story is simple: I took a nice picture of one of our local cormorants about three years ago. But I never got around to using it, and then I bought a new camera. The new camera was so much sharper than the old one that I no longer wanted to use the old picture. I wanted a new picture that would be sharper. But over time, my efforts became a sort of running gag. Every time I took my camera along on a walk, there were no cormorants. Every time there were cormorants, I didn’t have my camera.

But last week my patience finally paid off. I took my camera along on a walk and our little flock of cormorants was out! I took a quick picture. Then I got closer and a couple of them flew away. I took more pictures. Then I got closer still and a couple more flew off. Finally I got even closer and snapped some pictures just as one got spooked and the other was still posing. A few seconds later it took off too.

But I got a nice picture! Finally. After three years I can now go back to not caring about cormorants.

February 5, 2020 — 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.

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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