April 18, 2012

A Wee Bit of Navel Gazing

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What follows is navel gazing of the worst kind, so there’s no need to remind me of this in comments. But the chart below is sort of weirdly fascinating anyway. Based on data from Andy Baio, it represents the linking behavior of the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog over time. Positive numbers indicate that a blog links mostly to stories favored by liberals, and my linking behavior, from January 2007 through August 2008, was moderately biased to the left (a value of .05 places you in about the leftmost 20%). Then Steve Benen took over, and the blog immediately began linking overwhelmingly to stories favored by liberals. But over time, Steve became more ecumenical, and by January of this year he was favoring liberal stories only slightly more than I had.

I have no conclusions to draw from this. It’s just pure wankerific navel gazing. Do with it what you will.

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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.

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