The facts are on our side.

Giving it to you straight today.   [Mother Jones]( MoJo Reader, You told us to give it to you straight, so let’s start there. December is the most important month of the year for our fundraising. We need $350,000 in [online donations]( to keep the journalism you get from Mother Jones charging hard in the new year. And with fewer people paying as much attention to news as you are, we need more help than normal getting there. Please consider supporting the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed [year-end donation]( if you can right now. You also told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. Unfortunately, that’s also a good way to describe how following the news can feel these days: annoying, with the gimmicks, manipulation, and volume. You can see the predicament. We need to gin up [a big haul of donations]( in just over three weeks, but we don’t want to add to the overwhelming noise. We need to communicate the legitimate urgency of both our journalism and our finances, but we don’t want to go overboard with sky-is-falling rhetoric. We need to keep it snappy, but cover enough so something might resonate with most all of you—whether you’re brand new to Mother Jones or have been with us since the beginning, in 1976. Luckily, we have the facts on our side. And over the last year, you’ve shown us that level-headedly explaining the crisis in journalism, and how Mother Jones tries to navigate through it, can be effective in making the case for the [donations we urgently and always need](. We need it to be really effective now. So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. Maybe the best approach right now, given everything, is trusting that [less is more](? By now, the challenges confronting journalism and US democracy are well known. We’ve [covered]( [that]( [ground](. And at its core, fundraising like this should try to convey three things: Why us, why now, and why it matters. Why support Mother Jones? Our answer is simple: Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere. We were [founded]( as a nonprofit to do things differently: Our mission is to do investigative journalism that can help advance democracy and justice–that puts people’s interests over corporate interests. Not a lot of newsrooms prioritize independent, [in-depth]( [reporting](. We do. Not a lot of newsrooms [embrace their values]( and [tell you what they stand for](. We do. Not a lot of newsrooms [get ahead]( of big [underreported]( topics, and [stick with them](. We have—whether it’s attacks on [voting rights]( and democracy, the rise of [extremism]( and [disinformation](, or the influence of [dark money groups]( (plus so much more, but for now, less is more!). Why now? These fundraising targets are legitimately urgent for us to hit. Mother Jones has always operated on razor-thin margins. When we say “we can’t afford to come up short” that’s the honest-to-goodness truth, not just fundraising boilerplate—and we came up a bit short in our fall fundraising drive, so we have a hole to dig out of. The facts: [Donations big and small]( from a broad base of readers make up about 75 percent of our annual budget. There is no back-up, no secret benefactor, no alternative sources—and no cuts to make that aren’t painful. Given the terrible state of the news business, we can’t afford to miss the mark this month and fall further behind than can be managed and made up for. That happened last year, and we had to cut $1 million in expenses to have any chance of breaking even—and despite a huge rally from you all we still came up a bit short. That has real consequences, and readers told us this [concrete example]( of the hard decisions we have to make really helped them understand things. Beyond our harsh budget realities, why now? Because we’re 11 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 might prevail again thanks in part to a timid and weakened media. Journalism is being decimated right when we need it like never before, but Mother Jones can keep charging hard so long as we can cobble together the money—[the donations](—it takes to scrape by month after month, year after year. Less is more, or at least we hope, so we’re going to mostly leave it there today. But know this: When we harp on about hitting $350,000 this month, it’s not meaningless rhetoric—it’s the reality we face and urgency we feel our bones. And December is particularly nerve-wracking: Upward of 15 percent of the $1.4 million online fundraising budget usually comes in during the final week of the year. It’s always a nail-biter, and we can’t afford to leave it to chance and risk coming up short when it’s too late to do anything about it: So [I hope many of you will donate right now](, before you move on to whatever you’re about to do next. To make this as un-annoying as possible, we’re hoping to send fewer emails asking for your support this month, but the only way we can do that is if more people than normal respond and to this one and those that we do send. If you can right now, [please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a year-end donation](. We really need a lot of help this month (and always). Thanks for reading, and for everything you do to make Mother Jones what it is. Onward, Monika Bauerlein CEO Brian Hiatt Online Membership Director [Donate](   [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Donate Monthly]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. 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