January 21, 2009

Google Woes

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GOOGLE WOES….What’s going on with Google? Anyone know? It used to be that the search page came up instantly when I clicked on it, but then a while back it suddenly slowed down. Not a lot, but enough to be annoying. Maybe a second or two.

And YouTube has slowed down too. I can’t remember the last time I played a YouTube video all the way through without interruption. These days I’m lucky for videos to play 20 seconds before they stop to rebuffer.

And Google Alerts used to be great too. It was a perfect tool for getting notified whenever someone responded to a blog post I’d written. But now? About 80% of the alerts I get are for posts from blogs where I just happen to be on the blogroll.

All this stuff started a couple of months ago or so. Is it just me? Has anyone else noticed the same thing? What happened? And can Barack Obama fix it?

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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