August 21, 2009

Chart of the Day

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I haven’t had a chart of the day here for weeks.  What the hell is going on around this place?

Well, here’s today’s: day trips to Canada are down.  Way down.  It’s not clear why, either.  The accompanying story blames it mostly on new passport rules, along with “other factors, including the recession and the higher Canadian dollar.”  But that doesn’t really hold water.  The downward spike from May to June might be due to new passport rules, but the chart makes clear that travel has been steadily decreasing ever since it recovered from 9/11 in early 2002.  Obviously passport rules have nothing to do with this 7-year trend, and neither does the recession or the strength of the Canadian dollar.

So what is it?  Take your guesses in comments.

UPDATE: Actually, maybe the exchange rate explains it after all.

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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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