December 22, 2017

Twitter Slams LA Times For All-White Magazine Cover

Twitter is all over the LA Times today:

It’s not just an all-white cover, it’s a jarringly all-white all-blond cover (with one redhead). Even Donald Trump would probably look at it and shake his head.

Is this a frequent thing for The Envelope? I don’t have their covers for the past year, but a quick scroll through their most recent stories shows that 8 out of 30 are about people of color (or a roundtable that includes at least one POC). That’s 27 percent. Is that bad? OK? Good but could be better? I’m not sure. It’s better than the Oscars, at least.

But what I’d really be interested in is a story about how a cover like this happens. Obviously every magazine wants big stars who are likely to win awards. But I assume that you can’t always get everyone you want. Agents make their clients available depending on whether they have a movie to promote; whether they happen to be in town on the day of the shoot; whether they feel like doing it; etc. Did the Times invite some black actresses, but by chance they didn’t accept so they were stuck with an all-white roundtable? Or what? Once thing I know for sure is that it didn’t happen just because no one noticed it. At the very, very least, the photographer, Kirk McKoy, who’s shot a million of these things, certainly noticed it.

Somebody at the Times should write this story! Not in a defensive, apologetic way, necessarily, but more as a sort of explainer about how things work in the entertainment biz. It would be a good read.

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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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