Tales From City of Hope #13: Badass Blogger Edition

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My white blood count is now up to 2.4. More importantly, my ANC level is up to 2000. ANC is the front line of my immune system, and any number above 1000 means it’s working adequately. So if you’re sick and you sneeze on me, you are no longer likely to kill me. You’ll just give me a cold.

So I’m basically out of the woods. But not entirely. I have months of recuperation ahead, and complete success won’t be confirmed until a follow-up biopsy in 60 days. And then I have a difficult decision about whether I should enter maintenance therapy.

In the meantime, one of my sister’s graphic arts pals whipped up the image on the right. It is titled “Kevin the Badass Blogger” and available in a limited edition to those savvy enough to copy stuff from the internet. For extra credit: can you figure out whose body I’ve been shopped onto?

And speaking of images, last night I thought I’d try to improve things around here by downloading Photoshop Express to replace the crappy freeware image editing app I’ve been using. So I did. But apparently PE works only with a keyboard and mouse. It has no touch support. In 2015. WTF?

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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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