December 15, 2009

Twitter Mini-Storms

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I have a Twitter feed that I update very rarely (though MoJo makes it look a little more active than it is by automatically creating a new tweet every time I publish a blog post).  Normally, I get maybe one or two new followers per day, but every once in a while I get a mini-storm of new follow requests.  This weekend, for example, I suddenly got several dozen for no apparent reason.  Why does this happen?

POSTSCRIPT: OK, I have it.  After several minutes of arduous research, it seems that at 6:16 pm on Saturday Matt Yglesias tweeted about my Matt Taibbi post.  At 6:17 pm I got a follow request, and over the next five hours I got 32 more.  So apparently Matt is the instigator here.

Anyway, my Twitter feed is at http://twitter.com/kdrum for anyone interested in following it.  But bewarned: I still don’t post much on it.

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ONLY HOURS LEFT—AND EVERYTHING RIDING ON IT

A full one-third of our annual fundraising comes in this month alone. That’s risky, because a strong December means our newsroom is on the beat and reporting at full strength—but a weak one means budget cuts and hard choices ahead.

With just hours left, we need a huge surge in reader support to get to our $400,000 year-end goal. Whether you've given before or this is your first time, your contribution right now matters. All gifts are 3X matched and tax-deductible.

Managing an independent, nonprofit newsroom is staggeringly hard. There’s no cushion in our budget—no backup revenue, no corporate safety net. We can’t afford to fall short, and we can’t rely on corporations or deep-pocketed interests to fund the fierce, investigative journalism Mother Jones exists to do. That’s why we need you right now. Please chip in to help close the gap.

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