Your Daily Newt: Playing Nice on the Internet

 

As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.

Newt Gingrich has always presented himself, with some level of accuracy, as one of the more tech-savvy voices in American politics. He anticipated the the transformative powers of telecommunications in the 1980s, and recognized that Congress’ attempt to ban pornography from the internet was a really dumb idea. In 1995, he became the first Speaker of the House in American history to sit down for a 6,500-word interview with Esther Dyson for Wired about the future of the Internet.

But as John Heilemann explained later that year, something didn’t quite add up:

[I]t’s hard not to feel slightly cynical. The slight grows as you discover that Gingrich is, in fact, something of a technological naïf. He has owned a laptop only since 1994, for example, and does not use e-mail, a fact that shocked [Bill] Gates’s people and, apparently, Gates himself—the billionaire made a point of explaining the importance of e-mail to Gingrich at their dinner. When you ask the Speaker how much time he spends roaming the Net, he answers, “Not as much as I’d like.” When you ask him what he does in those sadly infrequent moments, he falls silent for at least five seconds—an eternity for him—and then responds, blankly: “I play.”

Oh.

 

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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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