January 16, 2014

Roommate Needed—$800—(Capitol Hill)

Christy Bowe/Globe Photos/ZumaPress.com; Craigslist

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Come live in the OMEGA HOUSE! One of our roommates left to start a pot dispensary and another is quitting his job and now we might need a housemate.

THE PLACE: $800/mo. plus utilities for one room in a two bedroom row house on Capitol Hill. Short walk to Union Station, Capitol South Metro, Johnny’s Half Shell, Charlie Palmer, and Bistro Bis. You’d take the larger upstairs bedroom and share a bathroom with two other roommates. Vintage ’70s record collection. Newish big-screen TV in the living room, which doubles as a bedroom. Place is occasionally a little messy but not unkempt. (Semi-kempt?) Peeling paint on the walls adds a rustic touch. Mostly functioning kitchen. Stove has a giant hole in it, on account of the rats. I was told not to talk to you about the rats, but frankly, that’s the kind of petty brinkmanship that the American people are sick and tired of. We’re in the solutions business. Real solutions that can bring real change and improve the lives of real people. Dick, the other roommate, is pretty good at killing rats.

THE ROOMMATES: Current occupants are three laid-back government workers in our sixties. We hold pretty busy lives and aren’t around the house too often. Not looking for a best friend, but someone we can have an occasional bowl of cereal with. (We eat a shit-ton of cereal. Come to think of it, maybe that explains the rats.) We’re fairly tolerant people, but it’s a small house so we ask that you avoid certain kinds of destructive behavior, such as drug use, smoking, and metal-bristle grill brushes.

Looking to show the place ASAP.

CNN

CNN

CNN

 

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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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