1/ Favor: I’d like to tell you a little bit about @MotherJones and why I’m asking for your support as we, like you, emerge from COVID isolation and gear up for the next year. secure.motherjones.com/flex/mj/key/7L…
2/ I’m incredibly proud of the work we did in the past 15 months. Here's a thread, and a report, on some of the most impactful work we've done in the last year:
3/ And incredibly proud that we made it through the pandemic without the layoffs that many/most news orgs went through.
4/ But that has not been easy. We make our money in a variety of ways, like subscriptions and ads, but the biggest piece of the pie reader donations. And without the ability to meet readers and donors in person, that’s been super challenging.
5/ Sure we had Zoom events, including with BFDs like Stacey Abrams and Eric Holder. But, as I’m sure you’ve all experienced, it’s just not the same. And lack of events and donor meetings has big knock-on effects for non-profits.
6/ And, just as we were deprived of in-person events, we also learned that Facebook had been deliberately, specifically dialing back traffic to @motherjones in a campaign to appease Trump operatives. Still enraged! motherjones.com/media/2020/10/…
7/ So we do fundraising drives twice a year. This one is particularly important. And not just for us. You know the trends. Far less journalists than a decade ago. A few big VC or billionaire-funded entities getting bigger, most getting smaller. It's an ecosystem and...
8/ Like any ecosystem, the whole thing collapses if major damage is done to any key species. Our role has been feisty investigative journalism that's often way ahead of much bigger outlets—think of our work on guns, or voting rights, or extremism—but also...
9/ We're a significant proving ground for young journalists who now populate key roles in the nation's newsrooms. Without such transmission belts of excellence—and a lot of them are gone or moribund, think alt weeklies—the whole profession is at risk.
10/ I'll be back in a bit to tout more of our great work, but for now I'll leave you with this piece that @MonikaBauerlein wrote about the challenges that we, and the media ecosystem face, and the promise we represent too. motherjones.com/media/2021/06/…
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Chicago is: amazing, complicated, corrupt, dynamic, multi-ethnic, waxing and waning. All the things that make for great journalism.
And its main paper is being raided for parts.
Also think this is a failure of Chicago's many very wealthy people who did not step up to help buy just the Trib or all of the formerly Tribune/Tronc paper, a chance they had as recently as two months ago.
A great thing about growing up inn DC in the 80s was it was such a mix of Go-Go and New Wave and Punk, and of course pop and the gods of MTV. Maybe that was the 80s everywhere. Well, not the Go-Go.
1/ Hey, something cool we're doing. @DavidCornDC wanted to try his hand at a newsletter. Rather than decamp to Substack, we decided to build a product ourselves. Why? Well...
2/ First, having a VC-funded entity skim talent from news orgs may be good for that talent (with good deals) for a time (or forever for the lucky few) but it's not great for the news ecosystem. And limits people to work they can do w/o larger teams, lawyers, fact-checkers...
3/ And those of us who've watched dozens of VC-funded plays for media unicorns, well...it doesn't always work out, shall we say.
Remember pivot to video? Remember all the Facebook broken promises? The Google CMS?
In reading up on this scandal I revisited the scandal of the most progressive supes voting not to remove Sheriff Mirikami after his domestic abuse case and my god this paragraph sfchronicle.com/news/article/F…
“Ginsburg said Thursday that Peskin’s alleged bullying and problem with alcohol has been an open secret at City Hall since 2000. “ sfchronicle.com/local-politics…
Several city officials say (not all of them named) that Peskin has been abusively drunk on the job...for decades.
Swear there is more weirdness, corruption, and dysfunction here, pound for pound, than other cities I’ve lived in (NYC) and also covered (DC).
"The coins amounted to $800, which the mother and her 18-year-old daughter, Avery Sanford, were forced to pick up by hand with help from several friends in the neighborhood. They have since donated the money to a domestic abuse center in Richmond" ajc.com/news/man-dumps…
“My mom came out and was like, ‘What are you dumping in my yard?’ " said Sanford.
“It’s your last child support payment!” the man said.