Fight the Friday Doc Dump!

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Late Friday afternoon, the Obama adminstration released a bunch of its visitor logs as well as notes from Dick Cheney’s interviews with the FBI regarding the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity. So after you read about how Cheney couldn’t remember anything, consider this: Politicians release documents on Fridays when they don’t want people paying attention to them.

Politicians know that fewer people read the Saturday papers (actually, few people read papers at all anymore), so fewer people will notice the newspaper articles. They also know that since most people read news websites like MotherJones.com and Talking Points Memo at work and most people work Monday to Friday, fewer people will see the news on the internet. Finally, cable news and broadcast news don’t have nearly as large of an audience over the weekend, so they will be less able to amplify what the newspapers and websites report. If you’re trying to hide something juicy, Friday is the day to dump it. Even if someone does find it in the huge mass of information you release, by Monday the news cycle will have moved on.

Anyway, you can help fight against the Friday doc dump: check out the visitor logs and the Cheney documents yourself, and send us an email at scoop [at] motherjones [dot] com if you find anything interesting. The faster we find the juicy bits, the better chance we have of letting people know about them. Thanks!

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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