January 7, 2015

Los Angeles Prepares To Be Played Yet Again By the NFL

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Here’s your sports factlet of the day:

More than half of the NFL’s 32 teams have used moving to L.A. as leverage since the Raiders and Rams pulled up stakes, playing their last games here on Christmas Eve 1994.

It’s like Lucy and the football. Los Angeles is Charlie Brown, and we keep thinking that this time she won’t pull it away. But she always does. And why not?

The tactic works. Since the last pro game here, 27 NFL stadiums have been built or undergone at least $400 million in renovations. “There’s no question that’s part of the game,” said R.D. Hubbard, who in the mid-1990s fronted an effort to build an NFL stadium at Hollywood Park.

“You always want one guy on the outside and you use him,” [said former Fox Sports President Ed Goren]. “It’s just good business.”

It’s happening again, of course, with the recently floated suggestion that the St. Louis Rams might move to a new stadium at Hollywood Park. For the properly pessimistic take on all this, I recommend reading Michael Hiltzik here. I find it comforting that no matter how skeptical I am about the NFL and Los Angeles, there’s always at least one person who’s even more cynical on the subject than me.

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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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