Mother Jones Nominated for Two National Magazine Awards

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Yesterday, we got the exciting news that Mother Jones has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards.

The NMAs are like our industry’s Academy Awards. On May 1st, editors from all over the country gather in New York (totally coincidentally, where most editors live), get dressed up, go to Jazz at Lincoln Center, fix gracious smiles on our faces, and wait to see if we win an Ellie (a replica of an Alexander Calder sculpture of an elephant—i.e. our Oscar—that could double as a rather stylish weapon).

This year we’ve been nominated for General Excellence (think Best Picture, the word “coveted” is often applied) for these three issues. We’re up against four other great, all very different, magazines in our circ size: Radar, Philadelphia Magazine, Foreign Policy, and Paste.

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My friend and former MoJoer John Cook emailed to joke: “We’re gonna totally kick your ass! MoJo and Foreign Policy will split the ‘stuff people should care about’ vote leaving Radar to sweep….” But I would never count Radar out (it’s so cheeky!), and then there’s Paste, which I give to about 40 friends for Christmas each year (d’oh!), and Foreign Policy and Philadelphia, like us, perennial contenders that are just as good as ever. (FP won last year.)

The other nomination is for photojournalism. Specifically this awesome photo essay by Lana Šlezić on the plight of the women of Afghanistan. In this category, we’re up against The New Yorker, National Geographic, Aperture, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which is edited by our MoJo contributing writer Ted Genoways, who just happened to write the text for our last photo essay. So we’ll try to be extra gracious if he wins.

These nominations are a nice nod to all the hard work put in by staff over the past year, one in which we overhauled the magazine and the site (tho’ more to come) and added a seven-person Washington bureau. Monika and I are really grateful to be working with such cool, hardworking, and amazingly (esp. given what we’ve put ’em through) sane people. So thanks to them, and we hope the rest of you keep reading.

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.

payment methods

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.

payment methods

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