July 12, 2007

The Webpage at the End of the Internet


I recently discovered the life-changing invention that is Google Reader and its “Next” bookmark. (Google Reader is a feed reader that allows you to aggregate blogs and news feeds using Really Simple Syndication (RSS). (Including this blog, by the way). But the real revolution is the “Next” bookmark, which you slide onto your bookmarks toolbar and use to jump around the internet from blog to blog, reading every unread item on the blogs whose feeds you subscribe to. That means I can jump from reading the newest post on the Blue Marble to reading the newest MoJo Blog post with unprecedented ease.

There’s only one problem, as far as I can see. If you run out of new items on the blogs you’ve subscribed to, you get to the end of the internet. Then what are you going to do? I guess when that happens, it’s time to pick up your print copy of the magazine and start reading the old-fashioned way.

—Nick Baumann

DOES IT FEEL LIKE POLITICS IS AT A BREAKING POINT?

Headshot of Editor in Chief of Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery

It sure feels that way to me, and here at Mother Jones, we’ve been thinking a lot about what journalism needs to do differently, and how we can have the biggest impact.

We kept coming back to one word: corruption. Democracy and the rule of law being undermined by those with wealth and power for their own gain. So we're launching an ambitious Mother Jones Corruption Project to do deep, time-intensive reporting on systemic corruption, and asking the MoJo community to help crowdfund it.

We aim to hire, build a team, and give them the time and space needed to understand how we got here and how we might get out. We want to dig into the forces and decisions that have allowed massive conflicts of interest, influence peddling, and win-at-all-costs politics to flourish.

It's unlike anything we've done, and we have seed funding to get started, but we're looking to raise $500,000 from readers by July when we'll be making key budgeting decisions—and the more resources we have by then, the deeper we can dig. If our plan sounds good to you, please help kickstart it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Thanks for reading—whether or not you can pitch in today, or ever, I'm glad you're with us.

Signed by Clara Jeffery

Clara Jeffery, Editor-in-Chief

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