September 10, 2010

This Week’s Dear Anna: Better Facebook Commenting?

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Is there a gentle way to nudge your Facebook friends toward leaving more thoughtful comments? Find out in this week’s Dear @nna over at SF Weekly. Excerpt:

“Reading the comments in my own feed makes me give up on humanity a little each day. (Ed. note: I don’t exclude myself from being obnoxious. I’ve been banned from people’s pages, for “unnecessarily abusing quotation marks” and “hitting on people’s moms.” Like I’m the one who named it “poking!”) This is the trouble with our ever expanding online networks, which often include hundreds of people, some we haven’t seen in years, but remember fondly as that guy we got wasted with and started several small electrical fires. The point is, we can’t all be as witty as you all the time, Snob.”

Read my proposed solutions here.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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