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After 12 great years, I’ll be leaving Mother Jones at the end of the month. This has been in the works since early December, but I wanted to stay around at least until Donald Trump got tossed out of office. So January 31 it is.

Why am I leaving? It’s primarily health related, but don’t worry: my multiple myeloma is no worse than ever. The problem is that the combination of the chemo drug and the dex gets worse all the time, and I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really feel like I can keep working normal hours. Clara and Monika have urged me to stay on board and do whatever I can, but that doesn’t feel right. If I can’t contribute the way I want to, it’s better that I leave now before it’s forced on me.

This doesn’t mean you won’t hear from me any more. I’m setting up an old-school blog and I’ll be writing there regularly—just not quite as regularly as I do here. Plus I plan to keep writing the occasional piece for the magazine. I’ll have more details about all this later, but in the meantime I figured I should let everyone know about this before it leaks out and starts up a bunch of weird rumors.¹

It’s been a great run. I have nothing but love and respect for Mother Jones and I’ll continue to read the magazine religiously. I hope you do too.

¹On the internet? Surely not. But you can’t be too careful.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

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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.

payment methods

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