May 29, 2020

Boosts of Strength and Stamina for the Weekend

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30 for 30. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act is all the more challenging and consequential in a pandemic, and encouraging news is in from the National Center on Disability and Journalism. The center announced a major campaign yesterday to spark more thoughtfully framed news coverage of disability communities by suggesting 30 story tips for journalists’ consideration, one tweeted (#NCDJ30for30) and shared to Facebook (@ASUNCDJ) every other day through July 26, the act’s anniversary. Stories range from COVID-19’s impact to tech’s role in transforming lives, all archived on NCDJ’s site. H/T to Kristin Gilger, the center’s executive director and senior associate dean at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and graduate student Molly Duerig, who helped create the campaign.

Pressing on. While printing presses cool off as newspapers slow or shutter across the country, a group of independent artists is hitting the printers, creating T-shirts for pandemic relief: “Unionize the Minors” shirts are on sale, with all proceeds going to minor leaguers and their families affected by COVID-19 in light of news about teams cutting off the minors. The brains, brawn, and creativity behind the shirts belong to Alex Bazeley and Bobby Wagner, who host Tipping Pitches, a podcast they started as NYU students and that’s evolved into a popular series about baseball, labor relations, and socioeconomics.

Say what? No description; just enjoy this bite. Thanks to my colleague Daniel Moattar for alerting me to it.

How to spend your weekend? By emailing recharge@motherjones.com with story ideas that highlight solutions, justice, goodness, and greatness, and spinning the daily blog at motherjones.com/recharge.

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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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