March 17, 2010

Mother Jones Awards Nominations Keep Coming

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And for that we’re thankful.

Last week we heard that Mother Jones is once again nominated for the ‘best of’ award for national magazines of our size (Garden & Gun, Martha Stewart Weddings: it’s on). The week before that we got two online national nominations for best blog (Kevin Drum) and best online news reporting (our intrepid reporters on the Copenhagen/climate beat). Plus we heard that our own Kate Sheppard, “the Meryl Streep of climate blogging,” is up for TreeHugger’s best Twitter Feed (follow her @kate_sheppard) and The Blue Marble is up for best green political blog (vote for them both, here). And around that same time we got word that seven illustrations from 2009 issues of MoJo are being honored by various distinguished outfits.

Now, just yesterday, we got more good news: that we’re nominated in eight categories in the best of the west awards, including, our Sept/Oct issue for best political issue of the year, reporter Anna Lenzer’s investigation into Fiji Water, staff reporter Josh Harkinson’s coverage of the US Chamber of Commerce (his latest Chamber scoop came this week), Kevin yet again, and four well-deserved nominations for the visual arts (sneak peeks after the jump).

And to ice the horn-tooting cake, our new human rights reporter Mac McClelland (author of the recently released For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question, which you can read an excerpt of here) is up for best local news voice in the “New Faces in SF Media” contest. It’s super easy to weigh in, you can just tweet your vote to #inforumsf (Twitter-phobes can use old-fashioned email).

Okay! Thanks for all your support, dear readers. Now back to our regularly scheduled (awards-worthy) programming.

 

Best Illustration of 2009 for Roberto Parada‘s take on “The People vs. Dick Cheney“:

Best Photo Illustration for Andrew Zbihlyj‘s rendering of Darrell Issa in “Enter Stage Right“:

Best Photo Essay for Eros Hoagland and Sarah Wilson‘s series on the Mexican drug war in “We Bring Fear“:

And Best Cover of the year, Tim O’Brien for our drug war issue, “Totally Wasted“:

 We’ll find out who the awards go to for all of the above by early May (for some much sooner). And if you’ll stand us, we’ll keep you posted.

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.

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 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.

payment methods

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