Welcome Inkblot, Domino, and Kevin Drum

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Remember 2002? There was no war, house prices could never go down, and the Olsen twins had a kids’ show. That’s when a recovering marketing executive in Orange County opened a Blogspot account, dubbed himself Calpundit, and began posting daily political commentary, often interspersed with his own data-crunching and graphs. He soon drew a following, and within a couple of years was widely known as one of the pioneers of the political blogosphere (and also the inventor of Friday catblogging). That guy, of course, was Kevin Drum, and this Friday, August 22, marks both his sixth anniversary as a blogger and his first day at motherjones.com. For almost as long as he’s been blogging, Clara and I have been fans of Kevin’s; since we took the helm of Mother Jones, we’ve been fortunate to have him contribute to the magazine fairly regularly, and we always thought that he’d be a great complement to our growing investigative reporting team. So we’re thrilled to welcome him.

Kevin’s coming over from Washington Monthly, where he’ll be replaced by Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report and Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. He’ll have his own blog at motherjones.com while MoJoBlog will remain a group effort powered by the entire MoJo team, including Washington bureau chief David Corn and the prolific Jonathan Stein.

Kevin comes on board as our web team is busy completely overhauling the site. Before the election, you’ll see a whole new motherjones.com—a new look, a much improved community commenting system. Kevin’s gotten a sneak peek at the design-in-progress and says it “should look great”—which, coming from a guy not known for hyperbole, is pretty close to unbridled enthusiasm.

Click below to hear Kevin talk about his cats, blog trends, and why he’s not going to the conventions:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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