October 13, 2009

Need To Read: October 13, 2009

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Today’s must-reads:

  • The Chamber of Carbon Commerce is really not that big [Mother Jones]
  • Robert Reich’s bold idea: Obama should promise a stronger climate bill… and wait until after Copenhagen to push it through the Senate [TAPPED]
  • Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signs bills to establish a Harvey Milk day and acknowledge gay marriages performed in other states [SF Chronicle]
  • Goldman CEO, having profited mightily from opacity, now favors financial transparency [FT op ed]
  • Baucus’ spokesman describes AHIP’s predictably unfavorable audit of the reform bill as “a health insurance company hatchet job, plain and simple” [Kevin Drum]
  • More on the media’s phoney “inter-generational war” in health care reform meme [MoJo]
  • The WaPo editorial page comes out in favor of the weak Patriot Act reforms
  • The naked-image security scanner: Coming soon to an airport near you? [Guardian]
  • Five ways you’re being secretly monitored [Cracked]
  • People feel “anxious” when they’re cut off from the Internet [Telegraph]
  • File under “Things Not Worth +$300”: A blade-less fan [Wired Gadget Lab]
  • Finally, Michael Jackson’s new song was actually old…and not his [Reuters]

Nick Baumann and I posts pieces like these throughout the day on twitter. You should follow him and me for more must-reads. David Corn, Mother Jones’ DC bureau chief, also tweets. So do my colleagues Daniel Schulman, Rachel Morris, Kate Sheppard and our editors-in-chief, Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein. Follow them too! (The magazine’s main account is @motherjones.)

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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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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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