January 27, 2021

All the World’s a Paywall Now

Eugenio Marongiu/Image Source via ZUMA

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It’s getting harder and harder to follow politics on the web. The big newspapers went behind paywalls long ago, of course. Then the Substack revolution started pulling individual authors behind a paywall. And political magazines have been steadily moving behind paywalls for a while. The Nation has been behind a paywall for years. Ditto for New York. And now even the blog at National Review is paywalled—parts of it, anyway.

It’s sort of ironic, I guess: the political internet is becoming more and more like the old political print ecosystem. Back then you had to pay to buy a newspaper, pay to buy a magazine, and pay to subscribe to a newsletter. And if you wanted to comment on political affairs, you needed to work for an organization that subscribed to all these things so that you could keep up.

Oh well. The internet was nice while it lasted. But we all have to eat.

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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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