We are down to under $35,000 $31,000 $12,000 $10,000 before we hit $500,000. We’re in the final countdown. I’m trying to balance my and our excitement that we’re going to hit the goal with whatever encouragement I can give you to help us get past the finish line. But I’ll just say we’re so pumped and also … well, this is a great time to contribute! Just click here.

I’ve been having a series of discussions about press coverage over the last couple weeks and they’ve drawn some seemingly not entirely related issues together in my mind. So this post won’t have a fully linear structure or focused point. It’s more collecting together notes I’ve been keeping in my head.

In a staff discussion several days ago we got to talking about how recently a lot of political press reporting just seems … well, bad. Everyone’s a critic of course. And TPM has always been critical of many things about mainstream media. But it seems worse. So we were discussing, is that really the case? Is it different? And if so, why would that be? We didn’t come up with any answers but we discussed some structural factors that I think play at least some significant role.

Victory, success, publishing salvation is now in reach, folks! You’ve stood with us for four weeks of this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. And we’re almost at the finish line. We’re just over 9/10ths of the way toward our goal. 4,157 TPM readers have contributed a total of $456,553 dollars, an immense sum. So we’re just $44,000 short of our goal of raising $500,000, which we are now pretty sure we will hit this week. I like to step back at these moments and marvel at this show of support. It’s an immense sum contributed by more than 4,000 of our members over and above their annual subscriptions. (The vast, vast majority of contributors are also members.)

If you’ve been planning on contributing but haven’t gotten around to it, I encourage you to make today the day. Just click right here. It’s super quick and easy.