You can donate quite easily and safely online via this link.
Here at AMERICAblog, we pay our daily writers, and I'd like to give all of us a Christmas bonus. A lot of blogs don't pay their regular writers (though some do), but I just don't feel comfortable having a friend write every day on the blog and not get something in return.
As you know, our crack team includes, Joe, who writes along with me during the day and is my deputy on the site. Chris is our overnight guy in Paris, paying attention to more worldly issues and corporate corruption. AJ (aka Alex) is our former Defense Intelligence guru who covers Iraq, foreign affairs/national security, and anything that Juan Cole says. And finally there's Cliff, who writes Cliff's Corner on Friday - a most irreverent look at the week that was. Mostly their income comes from a percentage of our ad revenues. This year, that bonus means even more as our ad revenues have been lousy the past six months, though this month, thankfully, the ads are back (and then there's poor Chris, who took a 40% cut in his AMERICAblog salary as he lives in Euro-land).
So, if you like the blog, if you like our advocacy and our reporting and our general sassy attitude, please consider making a gift to AMERICAblog this holiday. I'll share the donations with the guys, based on their relative responsibilities.
You can donate quite easily and safely online via this link.
Note: Donations are not tax-deductible.
PS A quick update on AMERICAblog 2.0. I've hired an html guru, who will also be our project manager. She is helping me put the finishing touches on the design html of the site (the design is done, but Leah has a few very interesting final changes she's suggesting). She's also helping us plot out the stage 1 and stage 2 functionality (we're going to launch with some basic functionality - you'll be able to create your own blogs, and more, then we'll build more in over time). And more generally, Leah is helping me manage the entire project which, as she said to me yesterday, is rather huge (I was like, uh yeah, welcome to my world :-). Leah is quite brilliant, we worked together almost ten years ago, and since then she worked at a huge PR firm doing Web consulting, and I'm very excited to have her on board. Over the next few weeks, Leah and I will plot out all the pages that the site will have (i.e., for you to create a profile, how many different pages do we need and what exactly will be on each page, where will each button/box be, and how will it look?). Once Leah builds all those pages in final html, we will then hand the project off to our database guy who will create the very complicated and very scary back-end that will run the site. I hate to hazard a guess, but I'm hoping that we can have the site up and running in two months, by March 1 (knock on wood). A project this huge takes time, but with Leah on board I'm finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Stay tuned, and thanks as always for your support.
