November 20, 2008

You Are What You Blog

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YOU ARE WHAT YOU BLOG….Via Andrew Sullivan, this is just scary. The Typealyzer sucks in the contents of your blog and spits out your Myers-Briggs personality type about two seconds later. Like pretty much everyone of a certain age who’s worked in the business world, I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs test a couple of times, and the typealyzer got my personality type exactly right. (Though my recollection is that it was a close call on the Sensing/Intuition scale.) This is especially impressive considering that upwards of a third of the text on the blog is excerpts from news articles and other blogs.

Methinks the web is getting too smart for its own good. Granted, my personality type probably isn’t too hard to figure out even from a 30-second conversation, but it’s a little unnerving that some heap of silicon can do it. If they can already do this, how long will it be before our robot overlords take over completely?

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The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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