“Oh no OMG please help!!!”

This is a tough email to write.   [Mother Jones]( MoJo Reader, We need you to consider supporting the journalism you get from Mother Jones [with a donation]( if you can right now. Today is the final day of our fall fundraising push, and it’s been a rougher one than seemed likely just a week ago. We’re about $55,000 short of our $253,000 goal. And we need an [outpouring of support today]( to close that gap big time before we pack it in and stop showing up in your inbox so much. This is always such a hard email to write, the final one of a big campaign, with so much riding on it. Rallying $55,000 today is 100 percent possible, but coming up way short is also quite possible, because the [big surge in last-chance donations]( we typically see in the final days of a campaign hasn’t materialized like we need it to. And that has us fairly freaked out. So this is our “Oh no OMG please help!!!” message. That’s what we use for shorthand when we need the urgency of one of these emails to come through loud and clear, and it’s also shorthand for how we want to communicate that urgency without the super [overwrought fundraising]( language we all see too much of. [You told us]( to give it to you straight, and that’s proven an effective way to [earn the donations we need]( over the last year, so that’s what we’ll do today even though it’s scary not knowing how things will end. It could be great. It could be really rough. [Please help](. This is simplest and hopefully best argument we can make for your [last-chance donation](. The journalism you turn to us for would not exist without [a broad base of community support](. We can dig deep, we can prioritize underreported beats, we can spend months or a year-plus on an investigation, and have a newsroom-wide team focus on an ambitious reporting project from several angles, only because readers are our primary [source of funding](. The market, corporate overlords, or deep-pocketed investors won’t sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do—only people who value it, people like you, will. Hitting these fundraising goals is [legitimately urgent]( for Mother Jones, and staying on track has only grown more vital over the last few years. We don’t have a backup source of revenue, we don’t have reserve funds like some organizations, and we don’t have any wiggle room in our budget—everything’s been [combed over and trimmed]( the best way we know how. And we learned something the hard way about this last year: We need to be more upfront with you about our finances and fundraising. The crisis facing journalism is [the new normal](, and the heightened pressures meant we had to cut $1 million from our budget last year to have any chance of breaking-even. Despite a huge rally from so many of you as our fiscal year ended last June, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We can’t risk falling too far behind than can be made up for again. That’s why [rallying a huge $55,000 in donations]( today matters so much: It keeps us right on track and helps us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. The ins and outs of just how hard it is in the news business right now aren’t obvious, you told us, given how much stuff gets published on the internet every day. And it’s true! Our feeds are flooded with stuff that looks like news, especially at a scary, chaotic time like right now. But how hard is it to sort the reliable reporting from the BS? So hard, people are making money on social media platforms uploading videogame footage as if it’s real war photography. So hard, tens of thousands of people are sharing fake videos and images on a platform owned by the world’s richest man because he can’t be bothered to keep staffers tasked with verification. Meanwhile, actual journalism is facing an extinction-level threat. With a tiny number of super successful exceptions, newsrooms are falling apart left and right. Earlier this year the once high-flying Buzzfeed News [shut down]( overnight, while Vice Media, once valued at $6 billlion (with a B) got [sold off]( to private equity investors for about 6 cents on the dollar. Just yesterday the Washington Post, owned by another one of the world’s richest men, [announced]( it is cutting 240 positions—almost 10 percent of its workforce. Then there’s this part: Journalism’s challenges are too easily exploited by those who benefit from a greatly weakened and ridiculously timid press. And we’ll let David Corn, our DC bureau chief, take this one in his [fiery email]( that talks about the [impeachment scam]( and Trump as a [stochastic terrorist]( to show you why [your support and our reporting](matter so much when most of the media is dropping the ball. It's nuts. We’re 13 months out from an election in which the frontrunner for his party’s nomination faces 91 felony charges, including for attempting to overthrow the government, which we all watched play out live on television, and yet that candidate could well prevail again. That’s a shocking sentence to write, but none of it feels all that shocking in the day-to-day anymore—and historically low traffic to news websites at a time of hugely important news backs that up. Our hunch is that crisis fatigue like that might also be why this fall push has been rougher than we expected. When we kicked this campaign off, a big question the two of us had was this: Will people care enough right now? Journalism and democracy are both teetering at the edge of a cliff, and they can both be brought back to safer ground, but it has to happen before it gets any worse—and mobilizing support to proactively avoid disaster is so much harder than rallying support once things hit the fan. But we need it to happen right now. If you can, please [support the reporting you get from Mother Jones today](. We simply have to hit our $55,000 goal or get a lot closer than we fear we might be looking at by the time the day ends and we stop making a big fuss about the money we need to keep charging hard. Thanks for reading, and for everything. Monika Bauerlein CEO Brian Hiatt Online Membership Director [Donate](   [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Donate Monthly]( [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