You’ll note we’ve restored the fundraiser button on the right. This is because to survive it’s clear The Moderate Voice will have to make it easy for people who offer to donate when TMV does NOT have a major fundraiser. Since the last fundraiser, debts including to Site Administrator Tyrone Steels (who redesigned the site totally after a brutal hack) were paid. It was estimated and some new advertising would make up for a major advertiser who stopped advertising.
Alas, the gap hasn’t been filled and I’m determined not to drop the few existing features The Moderate Voice pays for due to two reasons:
1. Most regular readers like them. People who find and pass along TMV posts on social media like them.
2. The Moderate Voice just lost a MAJOR supplier of wonder free syndicated posts and stories (that included a news agency). RepubHub was the second company to try a business model where they’d offer sites great free content from a variety of blogs and news websites and agencies, and also offer to syndicate material from websites (TMV was signed up). Like the previous company that went out of business, the wonderful people at RepubHub couldn’t make it work. TMV needs good material to survive.
Also, TMV is a site that has no major corporate backer or big corporate donor but has stayed open on its advertising, donations and essentially a few loans from people who could not afford to do loans. It has not made money the past few months and is behind on two bills. Its bank account remains small. Even so, we’ve declined offers from people who want to buy it.
Many blogs have gone under since the “Golden Age of Blogging” due the advent of big, excellent blog/news sites such as The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and most importantly social media where Twitter allows people to write short one iiners. And then there’s Facebook where many turn their page into essentially a political blog but with short comments as opposed to longer written posts. Google has often changed the way they rank sites, put TMV on and then off Google News, so our focus really has to be to offer good content, diverse content — and try to find advertisers who can help regularly support this site.
TMV has hung in there and definitely will throughout 2020. However, if it dropped its few paid features, people didn’t write for it, and readership plummeted it’d be a sign that it needs to gracefully retire.
The goal of $15,000 (from which Go Fund Me subjected money from the last fundraiser) is simply what we’d love to see in a TMV bank account which might even allows some upgrades. If we met that goal, we’d reset another since most websites such as TMV always have a donation button and the long range goal isn’t just to stay in place or not lose hits but to grow and expand the site’s capability and reach.
Two people contacted me in recent weeks asking about donating and noted how easy it was with the button.
So now the button is back.
PS: We won’t be running frequent updates on this, maybe an occasional one. And although we did not expect or ask him to, TMV contributor and comm enter jdledell is offering to double match donations (we want to let him know we’re appreciative but he can and should stop doing it at any time if he wants).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.