December 20, 2009

Embracing Twitter

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So: Twitter.  I’ve decided to take a second crack at it.  I’ve had an account for quite a while, but the problem is that most of the time I forgot all about it and never wrote any updates.  However, being the dork that I am, I concluded that if technology was the problem, then technology could be the answer too.  So I downloaded a copy of TweetDeck and set it up.  It works pretty well and offers some nice convenience features (multiple columns, real-time link shortening, easy replying/retweeting/etc.), but the main thing it does is pop up a little box on my screen whenever a new tweet arrives.  Benefit: I always remember Twitter is around.  Drawback: little boxes are constantly popping up on my screen.

I dunno.  Is this how it feels to be eighteen in 21st century America?  With a screen constantly full of things demanding attention: email, Twitter, Facebook, IM, etc.?  (Except no one uses email anymore, do they?  Instead they use the unbelievably primitive messaging functions built into apps like Facebook and Twitter, which feels to me like going back to the days of dial-up.)  Maybe.  I imagine I’m just getting a small taste of it, though.

Still, so far, so good.  TweetDeck forces me to pay attention to Twitter, and this inspires me to tweet more often.  Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen, but it doesn’t really seem to be interrupting my concentration or anything.  And it was pretty handy for following the chaos of the final day of the Copenhagen conference.  Plus there’s another bonus: Twitter seems to be generally friendlier than the blogosphere.  You really can’t get a good rant going in 140 characters, so you mostly get snark and wittiness instead.  That’s actually kind of a nice break.

Next step: build up the list of people I follow, which is currently a ramshackle of random names. Next step after that: get a new picture.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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