May 28, 2010

The Gulf Disaster, in Perspective

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How big is the Gulf spill? Over at Beowulfe.com, you can use Google mapping technology to see what it would look like over your town.

Andy Revkin talked to the site creator, Andy Lintner, about what inspired him to develop it. “I realized that if more people understood the actual scale of the spill, they would be angry too,” said Lintner. “That anger is necessary to force the change we need to prevent this kind of thing happening again.”

I mapped it over my current home in Washington, D.C., but it stretches almost all the way up to my hometown in southern New Jersey. The thought of a giant pool of oil stretching from the Capitol dome all the way to my family’s farm is indeed shocking.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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