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Brad Plumer, responding to a Clark Williams-Derry philippic against the white pages, says:

In the age of Google and unlisted cell phones, paper phone directories are being used less and less: One Gallup survey found that, in 2008, just 11 percent of households actually relied on them. Yet the vast majority of states still have laws mandating their delivery.

True enough. But when was the last time you used Google to look up a phone number? Sure, I do it occasionally, but not all that often, really. Rather, my guess is that the decline of the white pages is due mostly to ubiquitous auto dialers, email, and social media. Electronic phone books allow you to easily store hundreds of numbers and always have them at your fingertips. Email means that you have an alternate way of contacting someone you don’t know well (and also an alternate means of asking for a phone number if you want to talk). And social media means that you have easy access to a much wider circle of acquaintances than you used to. I’d guess that these are the real reasons that so few people use the white pages anymore.

But who cares? Either way, it’s probably time to get rid of them.

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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.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

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