March 20, 2014

Twitter Wants Everyone to Reminisce About Their First Tweet


Everyone is fascinated by Twitter’s new FirstTweet tool, and who am I to buck the trend? In fact, I was genuinely curious to find out what my first tweet was. It turned out to be this:

Huh. I guess Kirkuk must have been in the news on that day. So what’s the answer? What did happen to Kirkuk? Nothing much, apparently. It’s still controlled by the Kurds; it hasn’t seceded from Iraq; but it remains fairly autonomous from the central government. The most recent news, however, has been bad: two days ago a suicide bomber killed 30 people, and sabotage has shut down an oil pipeline into Turkey. In other words, it looks like Option B turned out to be the correct one.

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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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