Give Reason Your Money! (Please?)
Because defending free minds and free markets every darn day ain't cheap.
Nearly everything Reason produces, we give away for free.
Which is crazy, if you think about it. Podcasts! Reviews! Documentaries! Interviews! Explainers! Reported features! In-depth essays! News analysis! Debates!
Here's why we fling open the doors and invite everyone in every single day: It's important to us to send great reporting and ideas about free minds and free markets into the world, just like we've been doing for 50 years. We believe so strongly that our readers need to know about IRS shenanigans, bad cops, weird experiments in utopian living, exciting new novels, promising appointees, and disasters abroad from a libertarian perspective that we make everything we produce accessible to everyone who wants it. (Even the stuff in the print magazine eventually goes online for free, though you should still subscribe to get the full dead-tree experience.)
Here's the thing, though—all of that cool stuff costs money to make. So this is the time of year where we ask you to give us a little of your hard-earned dough in return.
Between now and December 5, we're going to be asking for your support. There will be webathon pop-up ads, which you can eliminate by donating! There will be a Facebook livestream of Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and me answering your questions at 1:00 p.m. Eastern today! There will be a big Reason logo filling up like a thermometer! There will be some begging, if you're into that sort of thing! There will be some bragging about greatest hits from the year and hints about great stuff to come! There will be swag!
To give you an idea of what your donation buys, I've helpfully matched the giving levels with the kind of vital work, gear, and services you money would help pay for:
If you hit us with $50, you'll get a Reason bumper sticker featuring the new Reason magazine logo. You'll also buy our coffee for the D.C. office for a week. And believe me when I tell you, no one want to see a world in which Reason writers are under-caffeinated. No one.
Donate $100 and we'll add a Reason magazine subscription (includes print or digital; digital includes access to archives of 50 years of Reason magazine), plus invitations to Reason events in your area. That donation will help defray the costs of Art Director Joanna Andreasson's runaway font habit. Sure, it looks great. But you don't get those sexy serifs for free. (We're looking into a 12-Step (12 Point?) Program for her.)
Upgrade to $250 and we'll toss a Reason t-shirt on the pile as well, featuring our new (as yet unrevealed) logo. That snags the hardworking Voices of Reason a spare microphone for the Reason podcast, which we'll need when Peter Suderman smashes his in a fit of Hulk-like rage over the latest health care bill.
Throw down $500 and you're getting all of the above, plus books by Reason authors. With your cash we can buy books for Reason authors, who cannot live on Google alone.
Your gift of $1,000 gets you a private lunch in Washington, D.C., with a Reason editor (pick me! I love lunch!) and an invitation to Reason Weekend 2018 in Palm Beach, Florida. That kind of money buys a computer for our next cub reporter. Because if experience is any guide, he'll show up clutching a duct-taped laptop from 2009.
When we're talking $5,000, you're picking up all of the above, plus a silver Bastiat coin and 2 tickets to the Reason Media Awards in Las Vegas (including VIP seating and a reception with Nick, Matt, and Katherine). That kind of money helps pay for an interview and professional photoshoot, like this one with advice columnist and due process defender Emily Yoffe, or this one with the publisher of the Danish Mohamed cartoons Flemming Rose, or this one with Flying Dog brewer and free speech fighter Jim Caruso.
And at $10,000, you pull everything you see here plus two tickets to Reason Weekend for first-timers. Because Reason TV has a near insatiable appetite for ever-larger storage drives. To be fair, we now have a full decade of pretty great footage to keep safe.
As the week goes on, you'll be hearing from me about what it takes to put together the killer content you get to read, share, and comment on for free every day.
I hope you'll consider donating to Reason in whatever form you prefer. If you're in a shopping mood, why not use Reason as your entry point to Amazon and get us a kickback every time you buy something. Matt Welch dreams that we'll get so many bitcoins he can fill a pool with them and swim around like Scrooge McDuck. (Pssst, nobody tell Matt how cryptocurrencies actually work.) Nick Gillespie is more of a cash man. And I'll be more than happy to take your credit card/Amazon/PayPal contributions.
