Mother Jones started life in March, 1975, as a project of a non profit entity called the Foundation for National Progress (FNP). Headed up by Adam Hochschild, direct marketing pro Bill Dodd, business wiz (and now Harvard professor) Richard Parker, and anti-nuke activist Paul Jacobs, the magazine flourished, growing rapidly (it had the largest circulation of any progressive magazine of the time) and being recognized with awards for its pathbreaking mix of investigative journalism and progressive culture coverage. Mark Dowie‘s piece on the exploding Ford Pinto pretty much ensured no advertising from the auto companies (the mag didn’t take another ad from Ford until 2006), and its special report on tobacco industry lobbying inside the Beltway put the kibosh on that revenue source, too. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the 'Fundraising+nonprofit' Category
MoJo takes on the IRS – and wins.
18 March 2011Thinking about the Quixote Foundation’s “Spend Up!”
27 April 2010This is a big week for fundraising conferences, what with the Council on Foundations get together in Denver (MoJo’s own David Corn was out there talking about gun violence issues). Judging from the twitter stream from @QuixoteTilts, the gathering of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy (#epip10) just prior to the CoF meeting was a rollicking good session, with some pretty fundamental questions put on the table about the who’s, why’s and wherefore’s of philanthropy.
It’s no accident that the Twitter voice of the Quixote Foundation was there and delivering a pretty interesting comment flow for the rest of us. As even a cursory look at their website will tell you, Quixote points its lance at the big questions, pointing its grantmaking at what it believes are the key opportunities for change. Full disclosure: Erik Hanisch, who with his wife Lenore and their great staff run this show, sits on my board of directors; Quixote is a grantmaker for Mother Jones. Read the rest of this entry »
The pioneers who paved the way
7 December 2009(Cross posted at Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur)
With fresh non-profit news ventures seemingly turning up left and right, you would think this was a brand new idea. But it’s not.
A wide variety of non-profit news ventures have been providing unique, professional-caliber, and invigorating perspectives on our world for many years. A number of ventures – like the Center for Investigative Reporting, Ms., or my own organization, Mother Jones – predate the popularization of the Internet by more than two decades (and let’s not even begin to count how many years The Progressive, Harpers, NatGeo, or The Nation Institute have been around!).
The pioneers of non-profit news cover the full array of media, from magazines, to radio and television, to online. Here’s an incomplete list of nonprofit journalism orgs that pre-date the latest wave (you can find links to many of these at the Media Consortium website – of which many but not all are members):
Thinking about archery/Rosh Hashanah 5770
18 September 2009The Hebrew word for “sin” is “Cheyt” – roughly “to miss the mark,” as in an archer missing the target.
When I was younger, archery was my sport. I was a terrible athlete, but here was something in which I could compete against myself, by myself. It took skill, practice, and focus. The equipment itself was a joy to handle. There was a meditative quality to it – a deep breath, release, and the arrow seems drawn to the target.
A few years ago, I was reminded of this by the Torah portion (Genesis 21) for Rosh Hashanah. In it, after Abraham’s wife Sarah gives birth to their son Isaac, Abraham casts his “other” wife, Hagar, and their son Ishmael into the desert (the biblical language blames Sarah for this, but there is always, always, another story here, the story left unrecorded).
Hagar and Ishmael soon exhaust their supply of bread and water; Hagar fears for her son’s death. At that moment, according to Genesis, angels tell Hagar that Ishmael will found a great nation. And the Torah says that Ishmael “dwelt in the wilderness, and became a an archer.”
The Koran tells us more.
First, it tells the story of Abraham sacrificing not Isaac, but Ishmael, and that God, as Allah, tells him to stop. Isaac/Ishmael: here are both families with the same story, in which the Old Man face of God is willing to sacrifice the life of a young man to prove a point. And in both cases, this God, now as the Shechinah, the feminine aspect, speaks out, and says, no. Not in my name. This cannot happen.
In this story, what we call God is about to proceed down a course of action that by any human definition would be seen as a sin. Like an archer, God misses the mark, but then turns towards the right path. This “turning” towards the proper path, or “teshuvah,” is the essence of this time of year; it’s often (poorly) translated into English as “repentance” meaning remorse or contrition, but it’s actually a call to right action.
The Koran also tells us that Ishmael and Hagar settled in what later is known as Mecca. And it records that Abraham visited “Ishmael’s tents,” not once, not twice, but at least three times. He came, we must imagine, to see how his son was doing. To talk with him, now, as a man with his own tribe, sheep and goats, family.
Is Abraham doing his own “turning” here, seeking to hit the mark this time? When a father seeks to overcome the distance to a child, isn’t that at least part of what is going on?
We’re all archers in our life, and we all miss our marks. In our own ways, when we turn towards the right path, we make t’shuvah. Let’s hope that in the coming year, we create many opportunities for accuracy, focus, truth, and compassion.
I’m guest blogging over at Free Press this week
2 September 2009The folks over at Free Press invited Dave Westphal from USC’s Annenberg Center (until a few months ago he ran McClatchy’s Washington DC bureau – one of the best commercial news sources around) and me to join their readers in a conversation about foundation-funded journalism this week.
This is a hot issue right now in the media punditry trade. MoJo editors Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein’s ed note in the latest issue of the magazine takes it on directly (interesting comments there, too), and Clara’s dissection of Sheri Fink’s (foundation-funded) Katrina piece for the New York Times is an illuminating look at what it takes to do investigative reporting these days.
I think Free Press asked me to weigh in because (a) this is something nonprofit Mother Jones has been living with from day 1 back in 1975; (b) I run MoJo’s fundraising program; and (c) I’ve written earlier about the topic here, here, and here.
Dave and I will be doing a live chat on Thursday, September 3rd at 8PM Eastern Time, if you want to drop by.
Here’s my FP post:
Clay Shirky’s “second great age of patronage,” foundations, and journalism.
19 July 2009I’ve written about foundation funding for journalism before (in fact, it was what got me started doing this thing in the first place). But Clay Shirky’s Cato-Unbound piece (interesting choice of publication site) arguing inter alia that we’re entering “a second great age of patronage” got me thinking again about this topic.
Shirky writes: this new patronage is
“. . .either of the ‘one rich person’ model, as with Richard Mellon Scaife’s subsidy of conservative journals, or the NPR Fund Drive model, where the small core of highly involved users makes above-market-price donations to provision a universally accessible good run for revenue but not for profit.”
Your local journalism fundraiser says it’s actually got to be both at the same time – since that is what a successful nonprofit fundraising program almost always looks like. It’s a measure of just how far the new nonprofit journalism world has to yet to go, fundraising-wise, that Clay sets up a distinction where it’s actually a continuum. Of course, there are reasons for that: mainly, the way these new projects are getting started – with (relatively) big money, and little or no membership/community base. And since journalists tend to be lousy community organizers, this could be a problem.
Friday dog blogging 3 July 2009
3 July 2009First things first: the main generator/switch at MotherJones.com’s Seattle “carrier hotel” (aka server farm) failed early this morning, which resulted in a fire, which triggered the sprinkler system, which took our site (and several others) off line. No indication of when it’ll be back up; we’re actively looking at a Plan B fix (if anyone has ideas for a quick solution, let me know). Silver lining, I guess: it’s happening over a low traffic holiday weekend. 
That also means no Friday cat blogging from Kevin, no frog blogging from the MoJo interns. (It also means you can’t get a look at the digital version of the new issue of Mother Jones, which has a totally kick-ass special package, “Wasted,” on the failure of the War on Drugs (so go buy a hard copy over the weekend).
My (belated!) response to Digidave’s video on Spot.us and MoJo…
28 June 2009I’ve been a doofus: Dave Cohn posted a video in response to this back at the end of May, and I promised I’d get a reply back to him asap. One hardware crash and MoJo board meeting later, I’m finally able to get into a conversation with him about Spot.us, Mother Jones, non profit journalism etc. (sorry Dave!) mainly because here I am 39,000 feet in the air headed to #PDF09, and finally have some quality time to do just that (although for the sake of my seat mates, no video…).
