August 4, 2010

Facebook Bleg

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This is a small abuse of the blog for purposes of personal mental hygeine, but…..

As part of its campaign to take over the world, Facebook has persuaded more and more sites to install its social networking widget. Unfortunately, beginning on Saturday, it started driving my browser nuts. I finally figured out how to uninstall it on the Washington Post front page, but since then I’ve noticed half a dozen other sites using it too. Every one of them sends my browser into overdrive, refreshing manically two or three times a second as it tries to figure out what the latest news from all my Facebook buddies is.

Of course, it’s only a problem on Opera. Firefox and Explorer work fine. Sigh. Which means no one cares. But maybe someone does! Anyone else having this problem? After a bit of trial and error I’ve blocked *facebook.com/plugins* and this seems to mostly fix the problem, but I know deep in my heart that it’s going to end up causing some kind of unforeseen massive system failure in the future. It always does. Anyone have any advice about how to fix this for real?

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON MOTHER JONES' FINANCES

We need to start being more upfront about how hard it is keeping a newsroom like Mother Jones afloat these days.

Because it is, and because we're fresh off finishing a fiscal year, on June 30, that came up a bit short of where we needed to be. And this next one simply has to be a year of growth—particularly for donations from online readers to help counter the brutal economics of journalism right now.

Straight up: We need this pitch, what you're reading right now, to start earning significantly more donations than normal. We need people who care enough about Mother Jones’ journalism to be reading a blurb like this to decide to pitch in and support it if you can right now.

Urgent, for sure. But it's not all doom and gloom!

Because over the challenging last year, and thanks to feedback from readers, we've started to see a better way to go about asking you to support our work: Level-headedly communicating the urgency of hitting our fundraising goals, being transparent about our finances, challenges, and opportunities, and explaining how being funded primarily by donations big and small, from ordinary (and extraordinary!) people like you, is the thing that lets us do the type of journalism you look to Mother Jones for—that is so very much needed right now.

And it's really been resonating with folks! Thankfully. Because corporations, powerful people with deep pockets, and market forces will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. Only people like you will.

There's more about our finances in "News Never Pays," or "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," and we'll have details about the year ahead for you soon. But we already know this: The fundraising for our next deadline, $350,000 by the time September 30 rolls around, has to start now, and it has to be stronger than normal so that we don't fall behind and risk coming up short again.

Please 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.

—Monika Bauerlein, CEO, and Brian Hiatt, Online Membership Director

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