Thanks to the 1,400 of You Who Contributed $187,000 to Reason's 2016 Webathon!
Your generosity will help slingshot Reason into its second half-century of defending Free Minds and Free Markets!
On behalf of Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward, and the rest of the weird and wonderful people who work for the Reason Foundation, I wish to extend my fondest gratitude to the 1,404 of you who donated north of $187,000 during our annual Webathon from Nov. 29-Dec. 6. Your gifts help us to combat injustice, debunk false news stories, keep the woodchippers oiled, improve and expand and extend the reach of our journalism, represent your views elsewhere in the media, and above all maintain a funding stability and resilience that our competitive set can only dream of. As Reason magazine heads into its 50th anniversary year of 2018, please take a moment to applaud yourselves for making our second-half century not just possible, but kick-ass.
Sooner than you can possibly imagine, we will have some exciting news to share about how Reason will be jacking up our game even more in 2017. Until then, and in anticipation of the holiday movie season, enjoy one of Reason TV's greatest hits:
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Have the squirrels double some of the donations and you can reach your 250k goal.
Or implement the edit button so you can edit the goal.
The convenience of typo correction is not worth the hassle of certain people retconning their previous posts.
^THIS
Edit button that locks after 15 minutes?
I have seen 90 seconds.
90 seconds is more than enough time to fix anything.
15 minutes or someone posts a reply. If a comment has been replied to, it cannot be edited.
As long as it shows the post was edited, or better yet shows the original text so you can see if the person was just fixing typos or what.
Time delay for editing like most reasonable (pun intended) sites do.
I really respect (and I am also shocked) that Reason did not extend the drive to meet their goal. NPR does that shit all the time. They got what they got in the time frame-provided, good for you Reason. Sorry we couldn’t meet the goal.
Less than last year? I forget. I know it didn’t hit the goal. Or any goat.
Was it last year that someone gave 50k, didn’t they move the goalpost right after that?
Pretty much.
Looks like presidential election years are bad years.
I suppose those are the years when more people see the partisan hackery they want to see and storm off in a huff to cancel their subscriptions.
But thanks to me the most, right?
Your $5 donation really put them over the top.
Oh, shoot. That must mean I put the decimal in the wrong place again. No wonder my bank reconciliation was short $4.50.
Mi, 63k short.
If our fundraising falls 25% short of goal, we fire the fundraiser. Thats . . . really bad. A little introspection might be in order.
Analysis: Too many extreme right-wingers chasing off liberaltarians. Need to bring them back by going more left.
Great, now you spoiled 2017 Webathon reward tiers.
Trump just needs to Make America Great Again so people will have the extra cash to donate.
They need more Robby.
And it’s not just more of his posts, his posts should be so long and visible that they extend all the way down the front page–because what everybody really wants is more Robby.
Is he for free speech? Against it? Is he against Title IX? Does he simply want it to violate everyone’s rights more equally? Can anyone tell? Does anybody care?
It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we get more Robby.
Is he for free speech? Against it? Is he against Title IX? Does he simply want it to violate everyone’s rights more equally? Can anyone tell? Does anybody care?
Doesn’t seem that hard to figure out.
I specifically asked for Robby to not talk about Lena Dunham anymore with my donation.
$187,000, or 23,375 $8 martinis.
No one needs twenty-three [thousand] Martinis
/Bernie
I do!
Reason staff drink 23,000 $8 martinis while children starve. Is anymore proof needed that libertarians only care about the 1%?
They care about the 40%. 80 proof, namely.
That coat Orson Welles is wearing in the gif? That’s actually The Jacket. It has taken many forms over the years.
Look, he has Welch’s bow tie also.
Makes me want to watch *Tales of Manhattan* again.
Wait… 1,400… But there are not 1,400 people who visit this site. After all, we are all only sock puppets.
I know it’s hard to believe, but regular H&R commenters are not Reason’s entire readership or reason for being.
I know it’s hard to believe, but I do crack jokes from time to time.
Yes, the “we are all sock puppets” kind of gives it away.
But responding semi-seriously to joke comments is kind of my thing.
That’s my other schtick.
Dammit, I need new material.
that is a terrible ‘thing’. Joke comments are all we have left.
I donated even though I hardly ever comment… Because, just like today, usually by the time I am able to read the day’s posts, everyone’s gone and no one would see my comment, anyway. (Like how probably no one will see this!)
But I’m always here, watching.
You know whose name I didn’t see on the banner? Episiarch. While that might have something to do with me not actually looking, I suspect it’s because the slaver was forbidden from making things right with the magazine financially.
He’s been left marooned. Buried alive.
…we will have some exciting news to share about how Reason will be jacking up our game even more in 2017.
Orange and purple.
No, if we’re going to be bringing issues of morality into it, the appropriate second color is blue
Primary colors are for closers.
…we will have some exciting news to share about how Reason will be jacking up our game even more in 2017.
A Reason magazine television network. (Basic cable.)
…we will have some exciting news to share about how Reason will be jacking up our game even more in 2017.
365-day webathon.
I thought they jacked their election coverage pretty hard. If they are going to jack their game even harder in 2017, my wallet is going to be closed even tighter.
facebook only commenting
Good god don’t even joke like that
Just in from the CIA “Proof of Russia hacking election”, also this:
Atlantis discovered under Antarctic ice!
City of the Old Ones?!
I’ll say “you’re welcome” if you run with my idea of a regular commenter guest column.
SugarFree’s Story Corner.
AC?
How about a rotating allotment where the space is not reserved for any one particular commenter. Perhaps a page with three items on it from the commentariat per issue to spur the vocal ‘dabate’ and recognize that it is not simply having hired a given person to be an unpaid columnist.
My specific recommendation was for a rotation. People submit, they can still exercise editorial control, because…yeah, that’s probably a necessary concession given the commentariat.
But there are some articulate people with really interesting view points that comment here. I wouldn’t mind reading some long-form essays from them. But I’m not visiting your damn blogs!
I really think this is a good idea. They have access to a resource here that they aren’t using.
The primary point of opening up comments is the free content.
Every time we have to be reminded to RTFA, it’s an affirmation that many of us are here primarily to read each other’s comments–and Reason doesn’t have to pay us to write all this free content.
I don’t read Robby’s articles because they’re interesting.
I read the comments in Robby’s articles because they’re interesting.
There’s a submission link.
Write something up and send it in.
https://reason.com/submissions
I don’t like those terms.
(And I wasn’t the initial proposer or advocate for the commentariat corner, I just offered an opinion on ways it might be done well)
I think Ken just might be implying that you’re into submission.
The submission link isn’t the same thing as dedicated space for long-form articles by commenters. Not even close.
I think we should convince Reason to do this. Our pitch to them should be done in a way that incentivizes participation from all around.
I didn’t have the cash or time to organize this during the current fundraising cycle, but next year a handful of us should put up a combined contingent donation in the ~$2000 range. The contingency is that they create a dedicated space/contest where commenters can send long-form articles to be published monthly. Reason then publishes a certain number of articles in “The Woodchipper” each month (it could be one article or a handful, depending on the quality of submissions that month), and then they somehow determine the best article every quarter, awarding the winning commenter some prize (maybe a hundred bucks or a free 3 year subscription to the mag or 3 months’ custody of The Jacket or a shirt that says “I rode the Doomcock in Warty’s dungeon and survived!” or something).
Nobody survives riding the Doomcock.
The Wednesday Woodchipper would be a great midweek pick-me-up. It doesn’t have to be weekly; bimonthly should be enough to keep it going.
…we will have some exciting news to share about how Reason will be jacking up our game even more in 2017.
Two-factor website authentication.
This is an interesting read:
Putin Hypocrisy
That did not need to be broken over three pages.
Matt,
I kicked in a 100 bucks to say thank you for some of the things you all write. I agree with every other article! I hope you continue to piss off all these Trump apologists in the comments.
Bullshit.
Also, I get a whiff of correlation between the recent election and the drop off in Reason donations. Basically, a significant number of people are rejecting those who are to cozy with “the man”.
Socialists don’t give. They take. Often violently and without justification.
Of course in the socialist tradition, it was $100 of other people’s money.
Amsoc is the perfect example of what happens when you don’t force people to pay off their liens.
Nice, I’m one of the 0.05%.
Yet I never got my promised Twitter shoutout. Fuck that noise.
I couldn’t contribute, but I did get a 3-year subscription to the print magazine. Running a fundraising event right before Christmas probably isn’t wise.
I only come here for the comments, what sense would it make to get copies of articles I don’t read to take up physical space in my house or otherwise waste the energy and materials to produce and deliver it?
/reason I don’t have a dead tree subscription.
I opted for the 3 year sub instead of donating this time also.
Yeah and literally a few weeks after a presidential campaign where I’d imagine many are making donations to their candidates of choice–I know I donated some to GayJay.
Matt,
My feeling is that there’s more money to be made appealing to Silicon Valley types that would be concerned with abortion rights, immigration, and gay marriage than trying to appeal to old cranks on Social Security (aka Welfare) worried about woodchippers.
Hmm. Their experience after a year of flogging women’s issues, open borders, and gay rights would seem to point the other way.
Pfft. Do you know just how little they’d have gotten if they didn’t flog so hard? Seen vs unseen!
I think more data is needed to support that conclusion.
As I observed above, presidential election years seem to be bad for their fundraising.
True enough, but the percentage dropoff being only slightly less than last time doesn’t do much to support the “liberaltarians are the financial future” thesis, which I believe was tested this year.
Goal not reached.
Biggest compliments to the articles coming from a commie.
Nothing to see here.
^This.
I’m trying to win friends and influence people so how many good things do I have to say about Trump to get you all to like me?
I like his tailor!
A good start would to try being less of a moron and a compulsive liar.
” how many good things do I have to say about Trump to get you all to like me?”
Just STFU. Everything else will take care of itself.
“I lie constantly and everybody hates me. I just don’t get it!”
There is no such number, because a) that’s not why you’re hated, and b) the only things you would praise would be socialist points of agreement with Trump, not libertarian ones.
I’ll donate in the new year. This month is bad to donate since extra funds go towards holiday spending unfortunately. Is the webathon always run this time of year?