Think Before You Blog

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“We’d do well to think before we post”: That’s the advice that the editors of the Columbia Journalism Review offer to bloggers in their March/April editorial. Matt Yglesias (of Atlantic fame) and Ann Friedman (of Feministing) would do well to heed it. Both bloggers appear to have been taken in by a cleverly-done April Fools’ prank. At first glance, this “New York Times” article about the Navy creating all-female crews for two submarines seems fairly believable. It mimics Times style fairly convincingly, and the page looks right. But the URL isn’t quite right, the “multimedia” links don’t work, and the “related stories” include several other April Fools’-related items. And that’s before you even get to the content of the story, which includes a photo of “Rev. Dusty Boats,” is written by “Seymor Conch and James Boswell,” and contains the requisite sentence about “mixing with seamen”. And then there’s this over-the-top “quote”:

I went to submarines to get a breather from my wife and her mother. Especially her mother. Now I have to spend 60 days underwater with women? You know how long they take in the bathroom.

Would anyone who actually thinks that way about his wife and mother-in-law tell it to the New York Times? The quote came at the end of the story; perhaps Ygelsias and Friedman, fine bloggers both, didn’t quite get there. Friedman has already acknowledged she was “belatedly gotten”. Is Yglesias trying to pull a fast one on his readers, or has he, too, been “got”?

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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.

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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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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