September/October 2009 Issue

Hot Water

Celebrities sighted with Fiji Water bottles.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Paris Hilton

Last year at the Sundance Film Festival, Woody Harrelson gave his handlers fits when he grabbed a bottle of Fiji Water from a cameraman and kept swigging from it during an interview—at an event sponsored by a rival water brand! Also spotted toting Fiji bottles recently:

Christina Aguilera

Jessica Alba

Halle Berry

Mary J. Blige (demands 10 1.5-liter bottles of room-temp Fiji Water before shows)

Orlando Bloom

Gisele Bundchen

Mariah Carey

Courteney Cox

Cindy Crawford

Tom Cruise

Matt Damon

Cameron Diaz

Celine Dion

ZAc Efron

Zac Efron (while hiking shirtless in Hollywood Hills)

Harrison Ford

Megan Fox

Sarah Michelle Gellar

Whoopi Goldberg

Al Gore

Al Gore (during MySpace Mos Def interview)

Anne Hathaway

Perez Hilton

Vanessa Hudgens

Kate Hudson

Hugh Jackman

Brody Jenner

Jewel

Paris Hilton (often drinks with straw to save lipstick)

Scarlett Johansson

Elton John

Nicole Kidman

Ben Kingsley

Lindsay Lohan

Eva Longoria

Nicole Richie

Tobey Maguire

Robert Pattinson

Brad Pitt

Spencer Pratt

Keanu Reeves

Denise Richards

LeAnn Rimes

Nicole Richie (hurled contents of bottle at paparazzi)

Maria Sharapova

Kimora Lee Simmons

Jessica Simpson

Britney Spears

Justin Timberlake

Ashley Tisdale

Keith Urban

Owen Wilson

Diddy (“It tastes so pure”)

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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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