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Early one Sunday morning in the spring of 1996, editors at the Washington Times decided that something in their paper was so terrible it had to be fixed, and that the edition already printed had to be destroyed. Nobody at the Times will say what caused such a stir. And don’t go looking for a paper trail — the Times shredded all 70,000 copies.

Shredding companies — like professional escort services — are among Washington’s most profitable cottage industries, with more than 18 listings in the local Yellow Pages. The Rolls Royce of shredders is the Whitaker Bros. 007S, which slices classified documents into particles 3/32 of an inch wide. “It’s a lot smaller than snowflakes,” says Whitaker salesman George Shugars. And the 007 line is in high demand: Whitaker Bros. is one of the leading providers of shredders to government agencies. The White House, for example, has its own 007.

Whitaker memorializes its legacy in the demonstration area of its D.C. office. There’s the kind that Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President used to shred Watergate papers. There’s the model Henry Kissinger had when he was Nixon’s secretary of state. And then there’s the type of shredder the U.S. embassy in Iran destroyed documents with before it was besieged by Iranian militants in 1979. What will the exhibit’s next addition be? Whitaker president Vince Del Vecchio won’t speculate. But rumor has it that a small Southern law firm recently bought its very own 007.

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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 canā€™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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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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