Continuing with my Overexposed LA™ series, this is one of my favorites—although it’s not especially overexposed, is it? In any case, you may recall a story a couple of months ago about going up to Griffith Observatory, taking a wrong turn, and then stopping because I saw a picture I had to take right away. This is it. While I was looking for a spot to turn around, I looked out the car window and saw the observatory with the moon rising right above it, so I pulled over at my first opportunity and ran back with my tripod in hand to get this picture. I really like it.

As it turned out, my “first opportunity” to pull over was a spot that didn’t allow parking. Luckily for me, another guy saw me parking and apparently figured that if I was parking there, it must be OK. Not so. When I huffed and puffed my way back, his car was being towed away. If he hadn’t been there, it probably would have been me being towed away. Needless to say, I hopped into my car and took off before anyone had a chance to get a second tow truck up there. Then I zipped over to the observatory and took this picture, another of my favorites. It was a very productive half hour of photography.

June 28, 2018 — Los Angeles, California

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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.

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