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Recent research suggests that web users are pretty catholic in their news reading habits. Conservatives read liberal sites and liberals read conservative sites.  Slate wants to check this theory out, so they produced an applet that tells you just how isolated you are, news-wise:

Here’s how it works: When you click on the “Profile Me” button, we will check which news sites you’ve visited recently. Then, using the same Web site rankings Gentzkow and Shapiro used in their research, we’ll tell you how “isolated” you are….We do not save the information, just your overall score, which will be used solely to compare you to other Web surfers and possibly, if enough of you try it out, other Slate readers.

My score is on the right: I clock in at +14, which means I visit more conservative sites than liberal ones. What an open-minded fellow I am!

Except for one thing: the vast majority of my reading is done via RSS — and most of it is liberal blogs. What’s more, when I head off to Drudge or Michelle Malkin, it’s mostly in hopes of finding something I can mock, not because I’m really interested in what they have to say.

Still, Slate says I’m officially open minded. Hooray for me!

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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.”

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