November 10, 2007

Party Ben’s European Vacation Tour

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mojo-photo-europe.jpgLike I mentioned in this week’s Top Ten, your grammatically-challenged guest blogger Party Ben is heading off on a European DJ tour tomorrow. It’s pretty cool, since, honestly, I’m not really that popular of a DJ, but somehow I managed to cobble together appearances in Poland, Germany, Belgium and France over the course of about three weeks. Because of the tight schedule (and probable unreliability of internet connections at the, ahem, budget accommodations I’ll be patronizing) it’s unclear how often I’ll be able to keep up with my Riff duties, but I’ll do my best to post updates now and then on What Life is Like on the Road for a Basically Unknown DJ Guy, or Random Cultural Trends Sweeping the European Continent with Enough Significance to be Obvious Even to a Drunk Tourist. Hopefully the MoJo Arts & Culture Team (I’m capitalizing a lot here, aren’t I?) can cover my beat—i.e., anything that happens in the world of Arcade Fire and M.I.A.—while I’m gone, and I’ll be back in December.

If for some reason you’re more curious about specific locations and venues you can look at the schedule on my website here. Now I’m off to enjoy the favorable exchange rates and general love for Americans that’s shared all over the—what? What are you saying? Not so much? Ah.

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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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