It’s December. The Santa invasion is imminent. Carols are blaring through shopping centres. The end of 2010 is nigh. Will this mark the end of New Matilda?
The New Matilda fundraising campaign has just two more weeks to run. That’s right, on Wednesday 15 December, the campaign that we launched in October will have come to a close. If we make our target, we’ll continue publishing in 2011. If we don’t, the existing website and archive will stay online for the immediate future but there won’t be anything new on the site.
We won’t kid around with you: we’ve got a long way to go. Can we raise more than $100,000 in two weeks? We sure hope so. We know there will be a spike in donations as the deadline approaches — but we need as many New Matilda readers and supporters to get on board and help.
Sign up if you haven’t already done so.
Talk to your friends about New Matilda and encourage them to sign up too.
If you think your employer would be interested in taking out an organisational or bulk membership, put them in touch with us.
And if you’ve ideas about potential donors we might approach for larger donations, let us know.
Over the next two weeks, we’re going to be review some of the strengths of New Matilda — to remind you what we do and why we matter.
We’ll be showcasing our coverage of the Middle East and international issues neglected by other outlets. We’ll remind you how we’ve addressed areas of long term interest for NM, like East Timor, Burma, West Papua and the Pacific.
Remember Copenhagen? When we covered the COP last year, we made a decision to quarantine discussions about the validity of climate science from our comments section. We were criticised for this, but we stand by the move. We believe that global warming is real — and that there are more constructive discussions to be had than those initiated by trolling skeptics. Our editorial policy as far as climate and environment issues are concerned will also get a run on the site in the coming weeks.
We’ll show you the breadth of our engagement with higher education issues, with the politics of migration, asylum seekers and refugees. We’re proud of the articles we’ve run on technology, freedom of speech, the Australian media and reproductive rights — just to name a few key areas — on New Matilda and we want to keep running them.
The articles we run sit most comfortably under the heading "progressive" but what this actually means is as big a mystery to us as it is to everybody else. We know that we’ve put many noses out of joint among progressives. We’ve angered people by deviating from the so-called party line on certain issues. We’ve commissioned articles that might have challenged the progressive orthodoxy. And while we’ve copped a lot of flak for doing so, we want to keep doing so.
Why are we doing this? To demonstrate that all this talk about independent media and its value isn’t just hot air. Have a look at our archives and see for yourself how we’ve contributed to the debate.
Bashing the media is an activity beloved of the armchair commentators of this land. We were as appalled as everybody else by the bland and partisan coverage of the federal election in 2010. We wish we’d been able to have a go. Rather than getting stuck moaning about what the big outlets aren’t doing, we urge you to get behind New Matilda, an outlet which has been providing feisty, independent, intelligent commentary and analysis for years.
Media diversity is shrinking. We don’t want New Matilda to be the only outlet to which our readers have access, and frankly, there’s little danger of that. We know NM readers are a smart and demanding bunch and we want you to read as widely as you can — but we also want you to be able to read New Matilda in 2011.
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New Matilda is a small, independent media outlet. We survive through reader contributions, and never losing a lawsuit. If you got something from this article, giving something back helps us to continue speaking truth to power. Every little bit counts.
