June 24, 2015

Shout-Out to the Baltimore Sun, Which Just Bought Charleston’s Newspaper a Stack of Pizzas


This is a nice story. Last week, we wrote about the heroic efforts of Charleston’s main daily newspaper, the Post and Courier, and their dogged, round-the-clock coverage of the massacre at the Emanuel AME church.

We noted that city newsrooms have been leading breaking coverage during big, national news stories, from Boston to Ferguson, Baltimore to Charleston. In April, the Boston Globe sent lunch to the Baltimore Sun’s newsroom. It was their way of paying forward another act of newsroom generosity when in April 2013, the Chicago Tribune bought the Globe pizzas during the bombing coverage. “We can’t buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch,” the Tribune wrote in a letter at the time.

Now, the Baltimore Sun‘s Executive Editor Trif Alatzas has sent a about a dozen pizzas from D’Allesandro’s in Charleston to the Post and Courier newsroom, as a way to pay it forward again:

I asked Mitch Pugh, the Post and Courier news boss, were the pizzas “hot and tasty?”

“They chose wisely,” he said.
 

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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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