July 5, 2009

Roger v. Andy

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I feel like I ought to have a post about the Federer vs. Roddick match at Wimbledon today, but I have oddly little to say.  The fact is, despite the spectacular final score, it didn’t feel like that great a match to me.  Roddick dropping six consecutive points in the second set tiebreaker set a bad tone, and the rest of the match was basically just a serve-a-thon.  That’s Wimbledon for you, of course, but in the end it just didn’t have the feel of an epic contest.  How is that possible for something that ended 16-14 in the fifth?  I’m not sure.

Still, it was great to see Federer get #15.  If Nadal doesn’t get his bum knee back in shape soon, Federer is going to end his career with a grand slam record somewhere in the 20s.  Amazing.

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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 can’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.

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