Double Your Impact: Donate to Support Narco News and Your Contribution Will Be Matched

A $5,000 Matching Grant from the Angelica Foundation Kicks Off October Fund Drive

By Al Giordano
Founder, Narco News

October 11, 2007

Dear Colleague: I’m taking a few moments away from my “leave of absence” (one in which I’m still responsible for making sure the bills are paid to keep Narco News reporting to you) to, first, praise the excellent journalism that our news team has produced from Colombia to Haiti to Guatemala to Oaxaca to the Mexico-US border in recent weeks.

As you know, Narco News has always published on a shoestring without charging for subscriptions or becoming dependent on commercial advertisers. It reports only because you want it to keep reporting.

Today it’s a thrill to announce that your donations to The Fund for Authentic Journalism to support Narco News will be matched by a generous grant from The Angelica Foundation, up to $5,000. That means if you give ten dollars, the project will receive twenty. If you make a $25 donation that will put fifty into the (starving) coffers, and a $100 contribution will become $200 to be put to good use.

Our ace team has put together this graph so that once you do your part you will be able watch and see to what extent other readers are sharing the load:

You can make your contribution today, online, at this link:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or send a contribution made out to The Fund for Authentic Journalism to this address:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
PO Box 241
Natick, MA 01760

All the contributions sent to The Fund go directly to this work: The Fund has no paid staff or directors, it’s made up of volunteers, like you, that want to keep getting the authentic news from Latin America that the rest of the media doesn’t report, or that, worse, it distorts.

There’s much reason to give today, beyond the fact that your donation will be doubled.

I’m particularly pleased with the ways that managing editor Laura del Castillo and editor Dan Feder have, in recent weeks, been putting the US-imposed Plan Colombia multi-billion dollar military intervention back into public attention in North America and around the world, with how Bill Conroy’s persistence with the “House of Death” investigation is pushing the story more and more onto wider media dockets, with Nancy Davies’ continued commentary from Oaxaca (as we approach the first sad memorial of independent journalist Brad Will’s assassination last October 27) and with Brenda Norrell’s work reporting on indigenous movements in the US, Mexico and Guatemala.

Norrell will be reporting the upcoming international indigenous gathering in Vicam, Sonora, with the Zapatista Other Campaign: No other journalist today has more experience with and knowledge about indigenous movements inside the United States and over the past year, including her April 2007 interview with Subcomandante Marcos, she’s been a key journalistic force in weaving closer communication between native peoples on both sides of the border. We look forward to reading her upcoming reports.

But the truth is that the project is hurting for the minimum resources that keep it going. The matching grant from The Angelica Foundation (one of the only major funders that has been with us and stuck with us since our birth in the year 2000) can be a shot in the arm if, and only if, you step forward to, one by one, make up the difference with smaller contributions.

Your donation of any size also qualifies you to become a co-publisher of Narco News, to post your own reports and commentaries to The Narcosphere, and to add your comments, corrections, critiques and additional information to all the stories we publish. One recent design change by our tech team links to Narcopshere reporters’ notebook entries by co-publishers on the top of the right-hand sidebar on the Narco News front page.

Please join me in showing (not just telling) Dan and the rest of the news team that we appreciate their hard work, that we believe in them, and that we want to keep seeing more, by putting your donation – no matter how modest – together with those of hundreds of other readers and supporters, so that we can meet the $5,000 threshold that would go such a long way toward keeping Narco News publishing for the rest of 2007.

Again, you can make your contribution today, online:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or send a contribution made out to The Fund for Authentic Journalism to this address:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
PO Box 241
Natick, MA 01760

And let’s, together, turn that bar graph red, from the bottom up, raising it twice as high as we would be able to normally accomplish.

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano
Founder, Narco News

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