Friday Cat Blogging – 21 May 2010

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Ah, the glories of a wide angle lens. Domino looks like she’s a furry python or something. If furry pythons also had whiskers and paws, that is. Over on the right, we have a repeat of last week. What can I say? Inkblot was out in the garden again yesterday, Marian plonked him down on a rock, and this is the picture that came out. Anyway, I figure it won’t be spring forever, so we should enjoy the flowers while we can.

(And what is Inkblot looking at? Birds, of course. There’s a nest in our neighbor’s tree nearby and the birds get pretty territorial about the whole thing. But their strategy is bad. All their chirping and buzzing just makes Inkblot all the more curious. Luckily for them, he’s also gravity bound and has a short attention span. So they’re in no danger.)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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