October 11, 2007

Anybody Else Having Trouble Downloading In Rainbows?

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RadioheadPerhaps it’s my own fault. I didn’t try and pre-order the album, I just thought I’d head over to inrainbows.com this morning and spend, I dunno, £5 on the thing. That’s like 70 bucks at this point, right? However (and I’m assuming it’s because of high demand and not a “denial of service” attack) the site was so desperately slow I wasn’t ever able to get through. And now, heading over there gets you a request for a username and password, which, when you don’t enter them, because what the hell, you get this lovely, personalized message from the band: SSI error: recursion exceeded. Beep! Well, people have been telling me my recursion is looking a little excessive lately. I don’t appear to be the only one having this trouble, either. Hmm. Perhaps reports of the music industry’s death have been greatly exaggerated?

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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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