September 9, 2010

Blogging for the Media Octopus

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Andrew Sullivan on the difference between blogging for yourself vs. blogging for a media site:

It’s salient, isn’t it, that even aggregator sites like Huff and Drudge are anchored by a personality embedded in their very titles. In the end, what’s unique online is what’s unique in life: the human individual….I’ve struggled with this, of course, myself. Why not just be an independent site, like TPM? The very difficult and entirely new attempt to integrate the Dish into, first Time and now the Atlantic has been a work-in-progress and sometimes confoundingly tricky.

The only reason this struck me is that my experience has been so different. When I moved from my own personal site to the Washington Monthly in 2004, there wasn’t even a glimmer of struggle. I had to bookmark a new URL to enter blog text, and that was about it. Almost literally, nothing else changed. When I moved from the Monthly to Mother Jones, ditto. I pointed my browser to a different place and just kept on doing exactly the same thing.

Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but at both places I’ve had editors who were happy to let me do my thing without interference, and since I work out of my home I hardly even noticed the change. I wonder how common my experience is compared to Andrew’s?

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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