Mother Jones magazine sees reader support surge
“Another slow news day, huh?”
It is 10:06 a.m., and the editorial staff at Mother Jones in San Francisco is huddled around a conference table, hunching over laptops and scrolling through phones as the stalwart magazine’s daily planning meeting kicks off.
On the phone are the magazine’s Washington, D.C., and New York offices, filling in their West Coast counterparts about the key developments of the day. Daniel Schulman, deputy Washington bureau chief, was being sarcastic in his quip about the sluggish pace of the news cycle.
That morning, troubling reports emerged that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had held meetings with the Russian ambassador before the November election, a time when Moscow was accused of in-
terfering in the presidential race.
The Sessions story was thrown onto a spreadsheet, alongside other forthcoming pieces tentatively titled “Is Sessions immune from prosecution,” “DeVos impact on the states” and “Trump/Russia TKTK,” a publishing industry placeholder meaning “more to come.”
Much more is to come, the editors hope. When Mother Jones was founded 41 years ago, there were no discussions about how to optimize stories for social media exposure, but the voice — solidly liberal, or, as top magazine staffers prefer, progressive but nonpartisan — remains much the same, as does the mission of delivering hard-hitting investigative journalism.
Editor in Chief Clara Jeffery describes the Mother Jones voice as “your smart, savvy, sometimes sarcastic friend who knows a lot about politics and current events and really cares about what’s happening to our democracy.”
Given the banner year Mother Jones had in 2016 — capped off by its designation as the 2017 Magazine of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors — it seems that news consumers are listening.
As a nonprofit organization that relies on subscriptions and donations to make up 70 percent of its operating budget, the magazine is poised to reap the rewards of a shift in the way journalism is paid for. As the Trump administration ramps up its antagonistic posturing toward the media, calls have gone out across the country for the public to provide direct financial support to media outlets providing essential journalism.
“The climate could not be better for them right now as a progressive publication. The winners in this political situation are comedians and Mother Jones,” said Rebecca Lieb, a media industry analyst. “There is a real consciousness emerging that people need to support independent news.”
For November through January, the magazine saw a 160 percent increase over the same period a year ago in small donations, typically $20 to $50. It also tripled revenue from donors who have signed up for recurring monthly payments, and had a 72 percent increase in Web traffic in January over the same month last year. What’s more, the number of Web viewers who subscribed to the print magazine, which comes out every other month and has a circulation of around 200,000, also tripled.
Taken together, that support has helped Mother Jones bolster its editorial ranks by 30 percent over the past 12 months, Jeffery said. The magazine brought in more than $13.5 million in revenue in its last fiscal year.
“People want to reward the work that’s being done and decouple as much as possible from the dynamic by which just clicks or ratings are driving journalism to the bottom,” she said. “At this moment, people very much feel the need for probative, investigative journalism in particular. If you want this stuff to stick around, you have to support it.”
Kate McKinley of Oakland said she became a Mother Jones subscriber after President Trump’s inauguration, though she had been a reader for some time before that.
“This was the first time I thought, ‘They’ve been so consistently good that I owe it to myself to subscribe,’ ” she said. “It just popped up in the zeitgeist that we need to actually subscribe if we want good reporting. We need to really support it. That should have been a no-brainer.”
Mother Jones was thrust into the spotlight in June after publishing a powerful investigative expose of the nation’s private prison system. The 35,000-word story was written by Oakland reporter Shane Bauer, who spent four months working undercover as a guard at a Louisiana correctional facility.
The story won numerous awards of its own, but beyond the accolades, it also provided Mother Jones with an opportunity to pull back the curtain on the enormous amounts of time and resources needed to produce the piece. In August, Jeffery and Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein penned an article explaining that Bauer’s story cost the magazine an estimated $350,000 — roughly $10 per word.
“Shane’s prison project took more than 18 months. That included four months in the prison and more than a year of additional reporting, factchecking, video production, and legal review, including work by more than a dozen other people on the (Mother Jones) staff. And that was the only way we could have gotten that story,” Jeffery and Bauerlein wrote.
“It was all a way to say, ‘We have a model here that we think can provide a road map for how we’re going to pay for journalism in this country,’ ” Bauerlein said. “We didn’t realize how much that was going to feel apropos” later, she said.
“As the media landscape has evolved, it’s become clear that indepth, quality journalism is not going to be supported by magic fairy godmothers appearing from somewhere. If there’s going to be investigative reporting, it’s going to be supported in part by the audience,” she said.
Along the way, Mother Jones has borne other costs of journalism, spending $2.5 million to successfully defend itself against a defamation lawsuit by Idaho billionaire Frank VanderSloot, who said the magazine falsely depicted him as an opponent of gay rights. In reporting on the court victory, the magazine suggested VanderSloot’s suit was politically motivated.
Both nonprofit journalism outlets and major for-profit operations like the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have all reported a bump in subscriptions in recent months, thanks in many cases to renewed attempts to appeal directly to readers for support. The New York Times, for example, aired its first television advertisement in seven years during the Oscars ceremony.
“They’re making the plea that journalism should have made a long time ago, which is, if you want quality journalism to exist, you’re going to have to pay for it,” Jeffery said. In the future, “I think we could ultimately be looking at a situation where we do have more of those major publications reconstituted as nonprofits.”
Gordon Witkin, executive editor of the Center for Public Integrity, said his nonprofit investigative journalism organization saw a “surge in donations” toward the end of last year. “We always run a year-end fundraising campaign, but in 2016 what we raised in individual fundraising was double our goal,” Witkin said.
He declined to say precisely how much was raised, but he attributed the rise in donations to the 2016 election and the “new administration’s feelings toward the role of journalists.”
“There seems to be an audience right now for our brand of nonprofit investigative journalism,” he said.
“People want to support facts — not alternative facts,” Jeffery said.