March 23, 2018

Friday Cat Blogging – 23 March 2018

I was up in Seattle last weekend visiting friends, and on Sunday afternoon I had lunch with one of my old roommates from Caltech days. I hadn’t seen him for about 40 years. Unlike me, he stuck it out and graduated, and now runs a company that makes fancy optical equipment (he’s an optical physics guy).

More to the present point, this being a Friday, he’s married and it turns out that his wife, Charlotte, is very much a cat person. Their current cat is named Scooter, and I was warned that he was a bit “grabby.” This turned out to be true, but Charlotte says he’s gotten better after ten years of work. That was true too: in my case, at least, he wasn’t at all serious about it. Just a lazy little flick of the paw that didn’t even come close to making contact. He eventually curled up next to me and started purring.

Naturally I took pictures.

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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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