December 4, 2007

Global Warming Threatens Another Endangered Species

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Doing its part in the high-brow Priusification of the green movement, the New York Times has just released its “Ski Issue,” reporting on the conversion of luxurious Swiss ski resorts into nothing more than luxurious Swiss sun decks and spas as snowfall even in the Alps decreases. Meanwhile one music fan and YouTube user has posted an unofficial video on behalf of the L.A. band HEALTH that honors another imminent casualty of Switzerland’s suddenly sultry climate. By pairing the heroic track “Heaven” with footage from Werner Herzog’s 1973 documentary The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner about Swiss ski jumper Walter Steiner, Bret Berg touches on a quandary heretofore neglected by the Times and many others: If the Alpine snowfields melt into a miserable puddle, whatever will become of the high-flying Swiss?

—Cassie McGettigan

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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.

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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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