UPDATE: The progressive website Think Progress is shutting down
The Moderate Voice needs your help.
Many blogs have died or are dying as you read this. Advertising revenues are way down — and only on The Moderate Voice. Some big digital news sites have had to do layoffs. One key must-do expense recently surprised Site Administrator Tyrone Steels and yours truly by instituting a big monthly price hike. TMV does have advertisers, but not a ton, so this price hike is greatly felt. Also, Tyrone has explained to me how Google’s juggling of rankings and Facebooks actions against some websites and blogs have decimated most blogs. A good chunk of TMV posts no longer go on Facebook but are automatically blocked.
We can try but ultimately can’t control those factors. But in recent months TMV’s hits have begun to climb and the smaller number today of TMV writers than in the past have been doing great posts.
One cut will be made. TMV pays for a limited number of professional opinion columns. We will next week drop one since we’re not using all by this writer and that cut will trim a little off the monthly expenses. But TMV will not cut any of the other small number of paid services and if that had to be done then the site would not be worth continuing.
As of today, The Moderate Voice still owes one newspaper syndicate some money for some columns (some recent donations helped pay a portion of that off). The bottom line: TMV isn’t going to survive unless it (somehow) gets more ad revenue and/or contributions. The FIRST goal is to ensure TMV gets through this OK until the end of TMV. The SECOND goal is to continue to try and offer more diverse content (not just political posts) over the next two years so the site can be around after 2020.
But the need is urgent.
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN HELP
1. Donate via the donate button (you can use a credit card). This goes into paypal and is then placed into the TMV BoA account (other banking by yours truly is with Chase). You can find the DONATE button on the right side of the site.
2. If you do Paypal like a several readers did, set up a recurring payment of $10 or $15 (although the goal of this fundraiser is to raise $2800 asap).
3. If you know of anyone who likes TMV or of a group or person who likes its concept enough to donate a generous donation please pass the word along (a donation will not influence the kinds of posts).
Updates will be posted (this post redated) every few days.
Image by angiechaoticcrooks0 from Pixabay
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.