*Friday Cat Blogging – 19 December 2008

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FRIDAY CRITTER BLOGGING….Since we’re now living in the post-partisan Obama era, it’s time for cats and dogs to live together. So today you get both. On the right we have Kona, my friend M’s German Shepherd. (Right? Looks like a German Shepherd to me, anyway. But I’m not all that handy with dog breeds.) I told M I’d introduce Kona to the blogosphere if she sent me a picture, and this popped into my inbox a couple of days later. An impressive critter indeed.

And you get cats too! Inkblot and Domino are taking the week off again because I was over visiting my mother a few days ago and took lots of pictures of her new kittens. On the left is Lily, the shy one, catching some rays on the window sill. On the right are Ditto and Tillamook, curled up together in a little sibling pile of fur. Ditto is the black-and-white one who looks just like Lily (duh), and he’s busily grooming a blissed out Tillamook in this picture. A few minutes later I went upstairs to bring down the Christmas tree, and shortly after that both cats were entranced. No breakable ornaments on the tree this year!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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