This one hit close to home for me.

Mother Jones had grown predictable, I even wrote. [Mother Jones]( MoJo Reader, The newspaper where I learned not to take no for an answer died quietly just one week before the election. Its final cover story was about hard times in the restaurant industry; the illustration, in classic alt-weekly fashion, was a fork bent so that it raised a middle digit. The piece included the line "You have to adapt or die. Sometimes you adapt and die." The story of City Pages, where I got my start in Minneapolis-St. Paul, is the story of what drives me as a journalist. It's a story of newsrooms that are feisty, uncowed, desperately needed—and on their last leg. It's personal for me. And I'm telling this story today in hopes of [earning your support for Mother Jones' feisty, uncowed journalism with a year-end donation](. As nerve-wracking as it is still needing to raise $125,000 hit our fundraising goal in the next two days, I'm so glad we rely on our community of readers even if it means biting our nails while banking on a surge of last-minute donations. I hope my full post, "[We Didn't Know What We Had Until It Was Gone](," explains why, and I'll try to share some of it here instead of just relying on that big fundraising gap to make the case for your [year-end gift]( today. City Pages was, to my 25-year-old self, journalism as it should be, and I remember literally skipping down the sidewalk headed to my first day at work, pinching myself that I was going to get paid (all of $20,000 a year) to do this. I already had a subscription to Mother Jones—it was the pinnacle of ferocious, world-changing journalism—and this job felt like the closest I would get to that. Like my colleague David Brauer, who tells a great story of his start in alt-weeklies [here](, I had been told that the way to build a career in journalism was to pay your dues at small-town papers, clawing your way up until maybe you landed at a metro daily. But that wasn't an option with my immigrant status, plus there was a recession—those papers weren't hiring anyway. One of the first stories Editor-in-Chief Steve Perry handed me to edit was by another young journalist, [Clara Jeffery](—now Mother Jones’ editor-in-chief—digging into how nearby Carleton College had covered up a spate of campus sexual assault allegations. (The [more]( things [change](.) This was a topic other outlets were still skittish about: Women "asking for it" remained very much a trope, one that Katie ["date rape or just bad sex?"]( Roiphe would soon make a [whole career]( out of. Clara's story had none of that. It was deeply researched, incontrovertibly documented, and compellingly written—and it made waves. It was the kind of story the alternative press was born to do. We didn't have to worry about offending a conservative suburban subscriber base—or anyone, really. Some of the best investigative reporting around the country came out of alt-weeklies, whose roots in emerging cultural movements allowed them to eschew the mealy [bothsidesism]( that hobbled other outlets: The Village Voice's [Wayne Barrett]( exposed what Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani were really about long before national media shook off its infatuation with them. The Chicago Reader exposed [police torture](. The Boston Phoenix blew the whistle on pedophile priests [well before]( the Spotlight team did, and Phoenix New Times showed us Sheriff Joe Arpaio's [reign of terror]( before it made national news. Portland's Willamette Week literally [dug through the trash]( of local officials to highlight that police were doing the same to citizens. City Pages, launched in 1979 as a music rag named Sweet Potato, was on the tail end of the great alternative-media blossoming that began in the 1950s and stretched to the Reagan years. Alt-weeklies, women's papers, LGBTQ papers, and community radio stations sprang up everywhere, joining the Black, Indigenous, and immigrant-focused outlets that had long served communities mainstream news was [ignoring or demonizing](. On the national level, there were countless new magazines, including [one]( named after a near-forgotten labor leader, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones. MoJo's founders knew the type of unflinching investigative journalism they set out to do would be best stewarded by [the community of readers who valued it pitching in to make it possible](, so they founded a nonprofit, and that's how it's worked for going on 45 years now. "The alternative media are catalytic, introducing new concepts and values which society then accepts (usually with modifications) or rejects," [wrote]( media critic Ben Bagdikian (after whom Mother Jones' [fellowship]( is named) in 1981. "This is consistent with the historic role of radicals in America, to whom can be traced once-extremist ideas such as the abolition of slavery; the progressive income tax; […] unemployment insurance; women's suffrage; racially integrated schools, and many more." By the 1990s, though, this mission was under pressure as the business foundations of print media were beginning to crack. Tom Bartel and Kris Henning, who started City Pages, would often tell me that "great journalism leads" a news organization, and revenue follows. (Which is my experience at Mother Jones: We trust our readers will pitch in, you trust we'll put [your donation]( to good use doing journalism that makes a difference.) But corporate consolidation was at the door, in weeklies as everywhere, and in 1996, City Pages became part of the Village Voice chain, the first of a string of sales to companies far more ferociously driven by quarterly profits. In late 1999, as the world was freaking out about Y2K, I fired off a letter to the new editor of Mother Jones. I had always loved the magazine, I told him, but it felt as if it had lost its way a bit and become predictable. Also, what about the internet? It was the kind of letter an editor should rightfully play wastebasket target practice with, but somehow I was invited to interview for a job—just another testament to the amazing boot camp alt-weeklies provided for journalists everywhere. Over the years, many of my colleagues from that time moved on, too: Jennifer Vogel wrote an amazing [book]( about her father, a famous bank robber(!). [Will Hermes]( went on to Spin and Rolling Stone. G.R. Anderson, who had helped keep up City Pages' tradition of hauling in big investigative awards (and on whose work, also in classic alt-weekly fashion, better-known writers liked to [piggyback]() went freelance. Beth Hawkins, who had shown me that you could be both a parent and a fierce journalist (because this was not what the broader culture was, or is, [telling us](), became a killer [education reporter](. At Mother Jones, 13 of us cut our teeth at alt-weeklies. For two decades after I left, City Pages afflicted the comfortable, comforted the afflicted, and sometimes afflicted [everyone](. In 2015, the paper was sold to the billionaire Glen Taylor, the owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Star Tribune. It was another "better these guys than the other guys" moment: By now, hedge funds were going in hard on the newspaper industry, and the rapacious [Alden Global Capital]( had already snatched up the Twin Cities' second daily, the Pioneer Press. Early this year, City Pages got its [first-ever female editor-in-chief](, Emily Cassel. (I had been interim editor way back, but she made it to the real gig.) When I called her a couple of weeks ago, we laughed about how often a woman or a person of color gets a top job just as things fall apart (a phenomenon so common it has a name: the [glass cliff](). But at the time, "everyone felt really positive," she says. "It felt like we were still putting out a valuable and interesting product. We were not hemorrhaging advertisers, and with new leadership and a really young staff we were ready to begin exploring other ways of bringing City Pages to a wider audience—podcasting, video, things that could have been really exciting." And then the coronavirus hit. Within weeks, people were talking about "[total annihilation](" for alt-weeklies. As my colleague Matt Cohen—another alt-weekly alum—[wrote]( in March, advertising dried up almost instantly: Almost every business that supported these papers relied on people gathering. Weeklies instituted furloughs and pay cuts (at what was left of Village Voice Media, staff writers [were told]( to take cuts of 25 to 35 percent, to an average of $30,000) and a good few shut down altogether. City Pages, too, instituted furloughs, but the team soldiered on, throwing itself into covering the pandemic and the George Floyd uprising. You see the best of the alternative press' spirit in that coverage: A three-woman team, including Cassel, went deep on what [a police-free Twin Cities]( would look like. Investigative reporter Susan Du—whom Minneapolis' finest had seen fit to [arrest]( when she covered the Philando Castile protests—not only hit the streets to witness the uprising, but also took time for the kind of [community-focused reporting]( that's so often missing from protest coverage. Reporter Mike Mullen skewered feckless leaders, self-appointed poll watchers, and the former congressional candidate who saw fit to stage a [maskless concert]( in a K-Mart parking lot. Cassel says she had no inkling that the end was coming; she found out about it on a Microsoft Teams meeting with senior executives on October 29, about 15 minutes before her staff was informed. Sadness turned to anger when they [learned]( that the Star Tribune and Taylor (who ["expects"]( to gain another $1.5 billion from selling the Timberwolves) had not even looked for a buyer to take the weekly off their hands. "People loved this paper so much," she says. "They would have done anything to help preserve it." "Love" is not a word you often hear people use about their workplace, but I knew what she meant because that was how I felt about City Pages. And so did a lot of readers. To be sure, there was "a bit of gravedancing," as Cassel puts it—tweets in the vein of "good riddance to you commies"—but mostly there was "an enormous feeling of grief that there was something really singular that City Pages did. For a lot of folks there was a feeling that we didn't know what we had until it was gone. I still see people tweeting: 'I would have loved to get the City Pages take on this.' But we can't anymore." For far too long, America has delegated the essential work of keeping democracy informed to the marketplace, and the marketplace mostly sucks at it. We've been told that all the media needs is just some new way to "monetize" audiences—search engine optimization! social optimization! [pivot to video!]( pivot to mobile! pivot to mobile video!—and some venture capital (or foundation capital) to fuel the right startup. But here's the problem: Starting from scratch can be incredibly inefficient. It takes a ton of time and money to build a newsroom and the infrastructure that surrounds it, and even more to develop an audience. What would have happened if even a portion of the time and money that has gone into new platforms and outlets for news had gone, at least in part, into shoring up and transforming organizations that had already done a lot of that work? I ask this, admittedly, with some self-interest. In the years since I left City Pages for Mother Jones, I've watched wave after wave of innovators reinvent the wheel that existing newsrooms were already putting their shoulder to every day. Most recent case in point: The Correspondent, a flashy initiative to create the English-language counterpart of the Dutch reader-supported news site De Correspondent. It launched with $2.3 million in foundation support and a slick crowdfunding campaign that ate up much of its $1.8 million in "runway funding," only to [disappoint]( its supporters (and [its first US employee]() when the founders admitted they weren't building a US newsroom after all. This month, after a few more steps down the ladder of ambition, The Correspondent [folded altogether](. And while I'm sad it ended up this way, I'm also mystified that it had to start that way: The Correspondent promised to "unbreak the news" with a model built on support from readers and in-depth reporting on issues that matter. Sound familiar? There were so many nonprofit US newsrooms pushing in this direction already—how much more return on investment could there have been in strengthening and innovating there? (You can find many newsrooms like that, as part of the Institute for Nonprofit News, [here](—many of which have matching gifts right now.) Why do big-name foundations and investors default to this launch-and-fail cycle over and over again, instead of advancing and improving work already being done? It's sexier, for sure—America is all about tearing down cool stuff and building something more boring instead. And when it comes to the alternative press, perhaps that legacy of pushing the envelope, of advancing ideas that won't become mainstream for a while, also feels a little too hard-edged for top-floor conference rooms and fancy pitch decks. You never know, after all, where following the truth is going to lead next. Cassel is right: Alt-weeklies have done something singular, and that something is not likely to be replaced by the philanthropic or venture-capital establishment. Wendi C. Thomas, a great investigative [reporter]( and founder of the Memphis-based, justice-focused nonprofit newsroom [MLK50](, puts it sharply: "How do I get these funders, who are part of the status quo, to support work that is aimed at disrupting the status quo?" Which is why I feel today exactly the way I felt back when I was skipping to my first day at City Pages: ridiculously fortunate to work where I do. Because at Mother Jones, we'd love to have an infusion of cash like that, but we also have something more durable and more powerful than corporate owners or investors with grand ideas: you. Millions of you who read our stories, watch our videos, and listen to our podcast—and hundreds of thousands of you who pitch in with a [donation]( or a [subscription](. Thanks to you, we can keep impudence and irreverence alive. We can punch up, push the envelope, and even find ways to [laugh]( (and help you [do the same](). And thanks to you, I hope, we'll never have to say that the next story you read from us will be our last. As stressful as these next two days will be, banking on that [last-minute surge of donations getting us the $125,000 we need to reach our goal](, the alternative—leaving our fate in some far-off boardroom—is much harder for me to fathom. Thanks for reading this long email. It means a lot and I do hope you'll pitch in if you can right now, but even if you can't, I'm glad you're with us and hope you'll share [my column]( on social media or by forwarding this email so we can reach more people. Sincerely, [Monika] Monika Bauerlein, CEO Mother Jones P.S. If you recently made a donation, thank you! And please accept our apologies for sending you this reminder—our systems take a little while to catch up. [Donate]( [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. To change the messages you receive from us, you can [edit your email preferences]( or [unsubscribe from all mailings.]( For advertising opportunities see our online [media kit.]( Were you forwarded this email? [Sign up for Mother Jones' newsletters today.]( [www.MotherJones.com]( PO Box 8539, Big Sandy, TX 75755