November 29, 2013

Friday Cat Blogging – 29 November 2013


Today is a “Where’s Waldo” edition of Friday catblogging, except that Domino is a lot easier to find than Waldo. Our quilt this week is another double Irish chain. Thanks to poor planning on my part, nearly all of our Irish chain quilts got backloaded into the end of the year, which is why you’re seeing a bunch of them lately. And there’s still one to go. This one is machine pieced and hand quilted.

In other news, I’m reliably told that whatever else you may think of it, the Daily Mail is your go-to destination for pictures of cute cats and other animals. Also, judging from its front page, it’s the place to go for hyperbolic Black Friday News. Here is today’s top headline in the US edition: “Black Friday chaos sweeps America: Man shot for a TV and another is stabbed for a parking space as shoppers turn violent.” You may, if you wish, take this as a data point against my thesis that Black Friday is fading away.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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