Getting back to normal.

All good things must come to an end.   [Mother Jones]( MoJo Reader, I suppose it's time to get back to normal after the unexpected and delightful [diversion]( from earlier this week. You're here for the journalism, not cute cats and dogs, so that's what I'm focusing on today in asking you to [support Mother Jones with a year-end donation if you can right now](—when all online gifts will be matched and go twice as far. The business end first: December is make-or-break for our online fundraising. If we don't hit our $350,000 goal, it's hard to see a path to the $1.4 million we need when this budgeting cycle ends—and it's not just our online fundraising line item that feels (more) uncertain this year. It's beyond nerve-wracking right now, on December 16, because it's impossible to know how our "[No Cute Headlines of Manipulative BS](" year-end push is really doing. We've raised about $85,000 so far, which is fantastic, but there's still a looooong way to go. And the thing about December is that a huge surge of last-minute donations usually comes in during the final week, and final day, of the year—so we won't know our fate until it's too late to do anything about it. We can't afford to leave anything to chance. And we're going to need a lot of help, more than normal, to get there. If you can right now, [please support Mother Jones' nonprofit journalism with a year-end donation](. All online gifts will be doubled until we hit our number thanks to an incredibly generous matching gift pledge. No amount is too small—growing our donor base matters more. The reason this all matters so much is simple. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. And advertising or profit-driven ownership groups will never make [time-intensive](, [in-depth reporting]( viable. They always put their business end first, too, but it's quite different than ours—so a quick look at how that makes our journalism different ([and hopefully worth supporting](). - Advertising was the main source of revenue for news when we were founded as a nonprofit magazine in 1976, and automotive and tobacco companies were among the biggest spenders. One of Mother Jones’ first investigations was about how automakers calculated that it was cheaper to pay settlements for deaths and injuries than to fix fatal design flaws in cars like the [now-infamous Ford Pinto](. Another was about how tobacco companies were trying to [snuff out]( efforts. It doesn't take a Mother Jones investigation to know car and tobacco companies wouldn't advertise alongside that. - The beauty of being [supported by readers]( is that we’re not locked into anyone else’s idea of what’s news. We can go after the stories that most need going after, and we can connect the dots to lift up underreported stories, and look at the [systemic forces]( and failures behind the headlines. Sometimes, they're all related—like our newsroom-wide, six months in the making reporting project investigating "[How Private Equity Looted America]("—ya think they're going to publish [stories like that]( in outlets they [increasingly own](? - I often get asked what our top three editorial priorities are, and one way to answer that is: democracy, democracy, and democracy. Everything else flows from this. Climate sanity won’t prevail, racial and economic justice won’t advance, people’s right to control their own bodies and marry whom they love won’t be safe, if we can’t protect and expand democracy. What drives traffic or advertising revenue does not factor into our editorial decisions. - To that end, right now our team of 50-some-odd journalists are largely focused on: [voting rights]( and voter suppression; election integrity and [the Big Lie](; dark money, [foreign influence](, and political corruption; [disinformation](, [extremism](, political violence, and platforms; [climate]( disaster, climate solutions, and decarbonization; [racial]( justice, [gender]( justice, [economic]( justice, [criminal]( justice. - Of course, ultimately the world does not fit neatly into buckets like that—and our beats, reporters, and specialists are meant to collaborate and overlap, because that’s where the hardest-hitting journalism often exists: looking at the whole tree, not just bad apples here and there. - Want more? Here's a [great video from digital producer Sam Van Pykeren]( talking about why he loves working here and some of his favorite projects from the last year. And here's a wonderful 44-message [Twitter thread from Ian Gordon](, our editorial director of teams and coverage, doing the same. [Twitter thread fron Ian Gordon]( Bottom line: Being a nonprofit means we can invest time and effort into big, underreported stories that are hard to do if you need to maximize clicks or look out for skittish advertisers. It gives us the independence to [call it like we see it](. And like a reader pointed out last week, it also means "you don't have to be a billionaire to own a valuable information source: the readers own Mother Jones. You should point that out." It's true, and readers are the only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down—because you actually care about its future, unlike [other]( [media]( [owners](. And the urgency behind it all right now: [Donations]( make up 74 percent of our budget this year. There is no backup to keep us going, no alternate revenue source, no secret benefactor. If readers don’t donate, we won’t be here. It's that simple. If you can right now, please [make a year-end donation to support our independent journalism](—that is entirely dependent on support from readers. Your contribution will be doubled until we hit our number thanks to an incredibly generous matching gift pledge. We need the pace of donations to start picking up if we're going to hit our $350,000 goal in the next two weeks, and we can't afford to come up short or leave anything to chance. Thanks for reading, and for everything you do to make Mother Jones what it is. [Monika] Monika Bauerlein, CEO Mother Jones [Donate]( P.S. I can't resist, and I somehow missed the deadline of our [adorable Monday email](—so here's Scruffy, who's notoriously hard to shoot even if he doesn't mind posing.   [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Donate Monthly]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. 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