You can donate quite easily and safely online via this link.
Also, you can use the yellow donor boxes in the left hand column to contribute to AMERICAblog.
- The top box is for a one-time donation
- The bottom box is for a recurring donation where you can pay, say, $5 a month automatically.
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AMERICAblog is now in its third year. We are a liberal political blog devoted to holding George Bush and the Republican party responsible for the mess they've made of our country and the world. We don't pull our punches, and you won't have any doubt where we stand on an issue. All are welcome, both liberal and conservative, so long as they share our goal of having a rational and civil discussion about politics. And while we appreciate our donors, and our critics, we do not and will not pander to anyone.It's been two months since our last fundraising appeal. I'm trying not to bug folks every month, but AMERICAblog is a full-time 24-hour-a-day 7-days-a-week operation, this is my full-time job, and we have bills to pay. Your support along with the ads are what keep us going (and the ad revenue is down again).
To give you a sense of where your contributions are going:
1. Staff. At AMERICAblog we pay our regular correspondents, and we have several.
- I work the blog the full-time, your contributions and our ad revenue are my income. I live in Washington, DC, life here is not cheap (think New York, but a bit better), and I make nothing close to the salaries of the heads of the top non-profits (e.g., gay advocacy groups) in DC, many of whom have the same, or less, impact than AMERICAblog.2. AMERICAblog 2.0 - we're revamping the blog and launching it on our own dedicated server hopefully in the next few weeks.
- Joe in DC spends about half his time doing the blog - he's a self-employed consultant, the time he spends on the blog is time he's not earning an income consulting.
- Chris in Paris spends about 20% of his time doing the blog - he's our night-time correspondent who focuses more on international issues from an international perspective. Chris too works for himself as a consultant.
- AJ in DC, our defense expert, only blogs a few times a week because we can't afford to have him blog more regularly. But we still give him a small but reasonable monthly stipend.
Over the past year we've been working on revamping the blog, hosting it on our own server, and adding a lot more functionality for you and for the administrators. We are perhaps a week or so away (knock on wood) from having our beta version done - I'll be inviting a select few of our most-trusted readers to help us work the kinks out of the beta version, then we launch (hopefully in a few weeks, but my guess is probably in a month).
Our contributors have helped us finance: the redesign of the blog; the actual construction of the back-end technology that will run the new blog (we're building it from scratch because the current software out there doesn't offer all the bells and whistles we want); and the monthly bandwidth costs and tech costs (we got a deal on bandwidth, it will "only" cost us around $900 per month, but we will need our tech guy working part-time to fine-tune the relaunch and keep the blog running, at around $1000 to $1500 per month).
And if you think the ongoing technical side of running a blog is easy or cheap, take note that DailyKos had to go offline a few days ago to deal with some technical issues that cropped up. The top blogs get a lot of traffic and lots of tech issues arise all the time - and that costs a good deal of money to fix. Remember, DailyKos has the same traffic as the White House Web site. We get about 1/6 the traffic of DailyKos, but still, on a good day we're talking 100,000 people a day.
3. Conferences.
I attend several conferences during the year to help the blog. The YearlyKos was one example (travel and hotel cost about $1000). I went to another conference this weekend with some of the top techie activists in the country - it was fascinating, and I got lots of great advice for AMERICAblog 2.0. But to attend these conferences costs money.
One final point: A few readers canceled their recurring donations today because they disagreed with my political analysis of the violence taking place right now in the Middle East. One even tried to influence me to change my views by threatening to cancel his donation. We'd like to think that you come to AMERICAblog to read an honest and smart analysis of what we believe is happening in the world, and not to simply have us parrot your beliefs or the beliefs of the highest bidder.
If you like the blog, if you like our reporting, if you like our advocacy, then please support us if you can. Thanks as always for your continued support for AMERICAblog and for independent media in America. Together we will get this country back.
JOHN
