December 15, 2009

Twitter Mini-Storms

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I have a Twitter feed that I update very rarely (though MoJo makes it look a little more active than it is by automatically creating a new tweet every time I publish a blog post).  Normally, I get maybe one or two new followers per day, but every once in a while I get a mini-storm of new follow requests.  This weekend, for example, I suddenly got several dozen for no apparent reason.  Why does this happen?

POSTSCRIPT: OK, I have it.  After several minutes of arduous research, it seems that at 6:16 pm on Saturday Matt Yglesias tweeted about my Matt Taibbi post.  At 6:17 pm I got a follow request, and over the next five hours I got 32 more.  So apparently Matt is the instigator here.

Anyway, my Twitter feed is at http://twitter.com/kdrum for anyone interested in following it.  But bewarned: I still don’t post much on it.

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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 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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