Friday Cat Blogging – 7 May 2010

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Back in 2004, Inkblot got his shot at fame when the New York Times decided to write a story about him. Seriously. Here it is. I still use that picture on my Facebook page.

But time marches on, and Twitter has replaced blogs as the hot new social media. And the star of Twitter isn’t Inkblot, it’s Sockington, profiled this week in People magazine. Inkblot gets a few thousand followers via this blog, but Socks gets 1.5 million followers via Twitter. As you can see below, that makes Inkblot melancholy. Over on the left, he’s practically given up at the thought of matching Socks’ fan base. It’s just too daunting a task what with sunny weather beckoning in the backyard. To make it worse, his amanuensis, unlike Jason Scott, is an aggressively non-clever human who has no chance of creating an Inkblot Twitter feed that would draw even 1.5 thousand followers, let alone millions. Very sad. Domino, on the other hand, thinks Inkblot already gets too much attention and is showing off her bathing abilities this week for your approval. I swear, Domino is the loudest, lickiest cat in the world. She keeps Marian up for at least ten minutes every night by hopping onto her pillow at bedtime and proceeding to give herself an extremely slurpy, extremely thorough bath. It’s an experience not to be missed. 

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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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