May 29, 2020

Boosts of Strength and Stamina for the Weekend

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30 for 30. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act is all the more challenging and consequential in a pandemic, and encouraging news is in from the National Center on Disability and Journalism. The center announced a major campaign yesterday to spark more thoughtfully framed news coverage of disability communities by suggesting 30 story tips for journalists’ consideration, one tweeted (#NCDJ30for30) and shared to Facebook (@ASUNCDJ) every other day through July 26, the act’s anniversary. Stories range from COVID-19’s impact to tech’s role in transforming lives, all archived on NCDJ’s site. H/T to Kristin Gilger, the center’s executive director and senior associate dean at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and graduate student Molly Duerig, who helped create the campaign.

Pressing on. While printing presses cool off as newspapers slow or shutter across the country, a group of independent artists is hitting the printers, creating T-shirts for pandemic relief: “Unionize the Minors” shirts are on sale, with all proceeds going to minor leaguers and their families affected by COVID-19 in light of news about teams cutting off the minors. The brains, brawn, and creativity behind the shirts belong to Alex Bazeley and Bobby Wagner, who host Tipping Pitches, a podcast they started as NYU students and that’s evolved into a popular series about baseball, labor relations, and socioeconomics.

Say what? No description; just enjoy this bite. Thanks to my colleague Daniel Moattar for alerting me to it.

How to spend your weekend? By emailing recharge@motherjones.com with story ideas that highlight solutions, justice, goodness, and greatness, and spinning the daily blog at motherjones.com/recharge.

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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.

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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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