June 2, 2010

Brodner’s Cartoon du Jour: NCS: THANKS!

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Saturday night I was honored to get to hang out with the National Cartoonists Society at their annual banquet. This was at the Hyatt in Jersey City (yes, Jersey City). It was a memorable evening. The hall was filled with wonderful artists and amazing legends: Bill Gallo, George Booth, Randall Enos (yes, THE Randall Enos), Mort Gerberg, Mell Lazarus, Mort Walker, Nick Meglin, and Sam Viviano were all there. The president is Jeff Keane. Yep, Jeffy. A very warm host and funny guy.

They gave the advertising award to an editorial illustrator who slipped on a banana peel and did an ad campaign. But hey, this is life, and sometimes it is absolutely sublime! I am extremely grateful to the NCS.

Here’s the campaign I’ve been having fun with this year:

It’s the Big ERP guys for PJA Advertising out of Cambridge. Amy Frith, Paul Yokoda, Chris Frame, and many other great people. The animations are done by my pals at Asterisk, Brian O’Connell and Richard O’Connor. Thanks also to Justin Rucker and Tammy Shannon of Shannon Associates, my reps.

Infor's competitors

Here’s the first one in the series. The big ugly guys trampling the customer, they represent Infor’s competitors, Oracle and Cisco. Sort of like, “We’re number three and we try harder.”

Infor--Carrots

These run as huge airport posters as well online (animated by Asterisk). This one is on the back page of the current Forbes.

There's this one: actually pasted on the luggage carousel at O'Hare. You can watch him eat your bags!There’s this one: actually pasted on the luggage carousel at O’Hare. You can watch him eat your bags!

This thing knocks me out. A motion-sensing technology. Working with Monster Media, Asterisk took my two stages and made this move. But they only move when you walk past…and apparently have your money vacuumed up. Art that constantly sucks!

My deepest gratitude to the Society and all the great folks I met Saturday night.

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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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