It's not accurate 100% of the time, but...

"It was in Mother Jones six months ago." [Mother Jones]( MoJo Reader, “If it's in the New York Times, it was in Mother Jones six months ago.” That quote is from Jeff Cohen, who co-founded the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and he said it some years back in making a point about how MoJo's nonprofit journalism is often ahead of the curve. And every once in a while, a story comes around to remind me that it's still true. Like this past Friday. Times columnist Farhad Manjoo [wrote about]( the "excesses of the private equity investment industry," as members of Congress took aim at the industry's favorite tax loophole, which costs taxpayers [up to $18 billion]( each year, and which a huge majority of voters (and even, if you can believe what he said in 2016, Donald Trump) want to see closed. Manjoo gives a great overview. He points to Tim Murphy's [brief and enraging history]( of how the industry's giant tax dodge has endured despite widespread opposition (and, thanks to Kyrsten Sinema, apparently [will survive again]( this time), and he mentioned that Tim's piece was part of an "excellent, multipart investigation of the private equity industry" that we published back in May. It felt good to be credited (a more typical m.o. is for a big outlet to just quietly pilfer a story), and I guess this time it only took three months for our reporting to make it to the Times. News moves fast, you know. And there was a lot going on when we first published the [private equity project](. It came out the week after the Roe leak and just before the horrific mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. When I first wrote to you all in the MoJo community about it, in late June, it was probably drowned out by the stunning details from the January 6 investigation, not to mention the Supreme Court overturning Roe. That's kind of the point though: Sometimes you have to go after a big story that isn't in the headlines. In "[The 'Animal Spirits of Capitalism' Are Devouring Us](," I tried to explain why we went deep on private equity even though we knew that it wasn't going to go viral or make a huge splash right away. We knew not enough people were reporting on this story of corporate power run amok, and that this lack of visibility is a big part of why private equity firms get away with their worst abuses (a point Manjoo addresses as well). And we knew that you all in the Mother Jones community want us to do big-picture, ahead-of-the-curve journalism like it. (Or like [this](, [this](, and [this](.) So for six months, the newsroom kept digging into private equity from many angles. Their work ended up taking up a [full issue of our magazine]( and an online package that has staying power beyond any one (exhausting) summer's worth of breaking news. It often goes like that with deep, investigative work that truly reveals something about the "the great unelected power wielders of our time," as MoJo co-founder Adam Hochschild put it years ago. You have to put in the work, and many newsrooms can't do that when the clicks won't stack up in the tough media landscape we're in. If you read these emails from me regularly, you are either my mom or someone else who cares quite a bit about Mother Jones, and so you know that our summer fundraising drive came up pretty short. And you can probably see why we will pretty much always face stiff financial headwinds—those folks making bank on private equity are not exactly racing to support tough-minded independent reporting like ours. So one final ask: Will you [consider starting a small monthly donation today to keep us charging hard for the long haul](? Anyone who pitches in $5/month or more gets our print magazine for free, six times a year, and each issue is packed full of our biggest investigations and other stories with staying power—the kind you might just find in the Times six, or three, months down the road. The honest-to-goodness truth is that right now, a month and change into our new budgeting cycle, my colleague Brian—who works with me on online fundraising—and I are really racking our brains over how we can realistically raise the $1.4 million or so we need from our online community in the next 11 months. It's going to be tougher than ever. So, [if even a small fraction of you who are still reading this can part with a few bucks, just $5 or $15, a month it would help us out a lot right now](. I hope you'll consider it. Thanks for reading, and for everything you do to make Mother Jones what it is. We love doing it all for you and with you. [Monika] Monika Bauerlein, CEO Mother Jones [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