[Lambert reporting: We reached the first goal, which was to stave off the importunate server folks. Thank you!
Gifts.... I am not rich, I'm a totally marginal blogger! And so Corrente can only continue with your help, because I cannot do this alone; your gifts allow me to run the server and pay the fuel bill and hang onto the house and keep blogging without having to go get a throw-away job, if that were even possible here. That should underline the title of this series of fundraising posts: "Give the gift of Corrente..." to yourself (and why not?), to people you know, and to the world (dan talks about this below). Because that is what you are doing!
Goals So about goals: I have two goals for this fundraiser. One is to expand the base of donors so we are not quite so fragile, and we do not place quite so much pressure on a few dedicated people (who are not not not celebrities). So I would like 100 donors to participate this year, which is a substantial increase over last year. So far, we have 911, which is good for a weekend, but surely we can do better? After all, 100 is -- let me break out a calculator -- .00180% of the 55,303 unique visitors we get each month. So how hard can this be?
More goals This year, I am also -- trying to learn from the people who succeed at this sort of thing -- going to set a series of financial goals, so you know where your contributions are going. The server people having been paid your $438.00, my first goal, then, is an additional $1000, which I will use to (a) pay off a debt to someone who helped me with the server the last time I was in trouble and (b) purchase a new pair of progressive tri-focals because my old and dearly-loved pair is sadly scratched and I need a new prescription anyhow!
Matching and how to do it Finally, CoyoteCreek has agreed to match contributions up to $300 (of which $157 is already matched). In PayPal there is a Note field, so please write "MB" in it so I can do the match. Or you can send mail to me at lambert_strether.corrente@yahoo.com saying you want your contribution matched to MB. This is a great idea of CoyoteCreek's, not only for the generosity, but because matching will help with the goal of broadening the base of people who donate to Corrente. So, since it's working, I hope that other people will consider following CoyoteCreek's example, and commit to matching the contributions of others in comments to this post.
Thank you again! --lambert.
And now, turning it over to dan!
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Corrente is an important site for liberals to support because of what it is and what it does. Here's what it is: an old school blog. While political blogs existed before 2000, they weren't part of the national consciousness. Bob Somerby's exhaustive chronicling of the media's appalling failure during the Bush/Gore campaign was the first example1 of an independent blogger getting recognition for the kind of analysis that was entirely absent from mainstream outlets. Read below the fold...
