October 12, 2009

Need To Read: October 12, 2009

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Today’s must-reads are at work on Columbus Day:

  • “Is Columbus Day Sailing Off the Calendar?” [WSJ]
  • Obama’s speech on gay equality was “highfalutin bullshit” [Sullivan/The Atlantic]
  • Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell protects bigots [WaPo op ed]
  • Great Recession Landmark: 100 failed US banks [NYTimes]
  • Nobel Prize in economics goes to Americans Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom, the first woman win the award [BBC]
  • George Soros invests a cool billion in clean tech [FT]
  • “Yes We Can (Get Republicans to Support Climate Bill)” [NYTimes op ed]
  • Obama should earn that Nobel at the Copenhagen Climate Conference [MoJo]
  • The White House goes on the offensive against Fox News [TPM]
  • Iran sentences three post-election protesters to death [AP]
  • Armenia and Turkey sign a peace deal and reopen their border for the first time since 1993 [Reuters]
  • The dangers of drudgery: bad jobs are killing people [The Economist]
  • Google co-founder Sergey Brin defends the controversial Google Books project [NYTimes op ed]
  • Listen to Michael Jackson’s final single, the appropriately titled “This Is It” [Bitten and Bound]

Nick Baumann posts pieces like these throughout the day on twitter. You should follow him for more must-reads. David Corn, Mother Jones’ DC bureau chief, also tweets. So do my colleagues Daniel Schulman, Rachel Morris, Kate Sheppard and our editors-in-chief, Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein. Follow them too! (The magazine’s main account is @motherjones.)

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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.

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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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