Surfing the New Stimulus 2.0 Website

Recovery.gov

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Big news for all you stimulus fans—Recovery.gov, the federal recovery website, just relaunched this morning. For months, the frustratingly sketchy website was the last place you’d go to keep track of where the $787 billion in economic stimulus was being doled out. While the adminsitration scrambled to live up to the president’s promise to account for “every dime,” ProPublica and Recovery.com put up relatively easy-to-use recovery trackers. (Congressional Republicans also set up a less-than-user friendly site at Sunshine.gop.gov.) So how does the revamped Recovery.gov 2.0 stack up against the competition?

A quick tour of the site reveals it to be a major improvement—especially when you consider it was pulled together in just 10 weeks. Its centerpiece is an interactive map where you can track grants, loans, and contracts by location, agency, or amount. You can zoom in on funding recipients by exact location, which you can’t do on the ProPublica or Recovery.com maps, making it easy to see where the checks are going locally. It also offers text lists of recipients by state and agency. ProPublica and Recovery.com offer lists by county and city, respectively—so will someone please offer a choice of recipient lists by zip code, city, county, and state? Perhaps Recovery.gov can be of assistance: For the super wonky, it offers downloadable data for making “mashups and gadgets.” Amid an otherwise so-so review of the site, OMB Watch says “this is actually a really nice feature.”

So what’s wrong with the new Recovery.gov? The biggest glitch is that its numbers aren’t entirely up to date. The chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board says that the data will remain “spotty” until January 2010, when recipients can correct any reporting errors. (These corrections will also be tracked on the site.) Also, the site is still not searchable by recipient; that feature is supposed to be available in October. (Neither ProPublica nor Recovery.com offer this feature; the GOP site does, but it’s a pain in the butt.) And the new site doesn’t reveal just how much stimulus money each agency has received. (ProPublica does, though.)

The verdict: Recovery.gov’s far from a one-stop shop for all your stimulus transparency needs, but better late to the game than never. 

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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.

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