September 10, 2010

This Week’s Dear Anna: Better Facebook Commenting?

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Is there a gentle way to nudge your Facebook friends toward leaving more thoughtful comments? Find out in this week’s Dear @nna over at SF Weekly. Excerpt:

“Reading the comments in my own feed makes me give up on humanity a little each day. (Ed. note: I don’t exclude myself from being obnoxious. I’ve been banned from people’s pages, for “unnecessarily abusing quotation marks” and “hitting on people’s moms.” Like I’m the one who named it “poking!”) This is the trouble with our ever expanding online networks, which often include hundreds of people, some we haven’t seen in years, but remember fondly as that guy we got wasted with and started several small electrical fires. The point is, we can’t all be as witty as you all the time, Snob.”

Read my proposed solutions here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

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