What If You Could Write Just One Thing a Year?

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In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 20 percent of the peas in his back garden produced 80 percent of the peas he later consumed. The Pareto principle is now a common business idiom, the so-called “80/20 rule” that predicts 80 percent of sales will come from 20 percent of one’s clients. Dan Shapiro, a tech entrepreneur in Seattle, says the Pareto principle is at play in the news media, too, with a handful of each day’s stories containing valuable information and context, but hard to fish out from a river of noise. Taking a page from the 140-character Twitter playbook and the artificial constraints imposed by sites like Path, which lets you add only 50 friends to your network, Shapiro reasoned that rationing breeds good decision making. “Arbitrary limits can be powerful creative forces. I thought, ‘What if you could just say one thing, but you got to shout it from the rooftops for everyone to hear?'”

The idea behind Shapiro’s new side project—he’s a product manager at Google and former CEO of Ontela—plays with creative constraints: anyone who signs up at his site, The Best Thing This Year, gets to post one item every 364 days to an email distribution list. Anyone can sign up, and only members can post to the list. You can’t post again for a whole year, so you’d better make it count. 

Shapiro expects that a lot of list members will be hawking their own projects and companies, and he’s fine with that. If you can only post once a year, he figures, you’ll probably write about your absolute very best work and put your best foot forward, making for some fascinating reads. Shapiro plans to post to the list himself, but has no clue what topic to take. “I’m terrified of the pressure to figure it out!” he says. “But that’s part of the fun. As someone said on Twitter, “Now I have to stress for 364 days figuring out what to write.”

TBTTY’s first post went out last night, a nice writeup from the founder of a digital entertainment studio about his new “alternate reality gaming” site Rides.tv, where you watch web sitcoms in which the characters call your cell phone (you supply your number when you sign up for the site) and send emails to your inbox. Sign up for TBTTY here, but if you want to contribute sometime this decade, you’ll need to move fast: 1,200 have tossed their names into the hat so far, and the waiting list to contribute is equally long. Shapiro says he’s not looking to make money off of the site, though. “This is just a tiny experiment,” he says. “Someone told me it was just a mailing list with a gimmick, and I don’t dispute that for a minute. I like gimmicks, and I’m excited to see what comes of this one.”

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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 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.

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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.

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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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