Paste Magazine: Don’t Blame (Or Praise) Canada

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Mea Culpa: In a roundup of various books, movies, and magazines that the staff reccomended to readers as holiday gifts, my entry on Paste Magazine reported, in error, that it was a Canadian operation.

Reader Tom Monk, a lawyer out of Atlanta, was quick to point out that: “Au contrare,­ it is based in Decatur, GA. With our country in the middle of a cycle where many of our jobs and services are being transferred overseas, we should make a point to note something good within our borders, don’t you think?”

Fair enough, Tom. I’m not quite sure why I thought Paste was a product of the Great White North. Canada, while a great exporter of comedians, TV anchors, and magazine writers and editors, has (at least since the heydey of Jonnie Mitchell, Neil Young, and The Band) never really been known for producing a lot of great pop/indie music. [Care to argue? For a geographical breakdown of Candian bands, most of whom you’ve never heard of, go here. I still have a soft spot for Chilliwack.]

Georgia on the other hand, well now. You got R.E.M., of course, and all the Athens spin-offs (Remember Guadalcanal Diary?) And Ray Charles, who’s genius should be enough for several states, territories, or provinces.

But maybe, to make up for my error, I should tell you why I not only reccomended Paste to readers, but I bought gift subcriptions for more than a dozen of my friends. Why? For starters, there’s the CD that comes with each issue, a 20+ song sampler of bands the editors like. Mostly (but not soley) alt/indie rock tracks with a singer/songwriter slant (but not in a we’re-all-vegans-here way). And how much do you love that their FAQ notes “Paste is about the artists, not about the artists’ bodies.” (Translation: No Britney!) It’s a thinking person’s (mostly) music and (some other) culture magazine.

Supporting good independent magazines is important. Back of the napkin calculations indicate that if I guaranteed the editors of Paste a dozen subscriptions at $34.95, they need to sign up 42 of their friends for a Mother Jones subscription, which you can get for only $10, in order for us to be even. En garde!

Meanwhile, if you’re in the Atlanta area, best get some legal advice from Tom, instead of exporting litigation to say…Florida.

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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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