BPCares for Sale

Image courtesy of <a href="http://www.streetgiant.bigcartel.com/product/bp-cares-green">StreetGiant</a>.

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I’ve been getting a lot of emails from Joseph Rollins, a guy in North Carolina who owns “BP Cares” and related web domains shortly after the oil spill. And I do mean all of them:

www.bpcares.com
www.bpcares.net
www.bpcares.org
www.bpcares.info
www.bpcares.us
www.bpcares.biz
www.bpcare.net
www.bpcare.org
www.bpcare.info
www.bpcare.biz
www.bpcare.us

Rollins has put them up for sale, asking for $68,000 for all 11 domains. He says he’ll give half of the proceeds to Gulf coast charities. He also says that he wants to sell them to someone other than BP, as he thinks the oil giant has been trying to buy them up:

Since the situation in the Gulf, I have received hundreds of calls per week from individuals, groups and organizations indicating there interest in acquiring the domains. I have received inquiries from individuals claiming to be working on behalf of BP who were very interested in acquiring the domains. I have communicated with BP. BP may be using individuals, groups and organizations to acquire the domains from me.”

I’m not endorsing the dollar figure he wants for the sites, but considering all the fun BPglobalPR and BPCares have been having with this meme on Twitter (and all the work BP has done to drive viewers to their site rather than anything critical of the company), the sites could be an interesting investment. His phone is 803-665-6348 or you can email at jrollins005@carolina.rr.com.

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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.

payment methods

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