Over the summer, careful readers may have noticed that I’ve mentioned an upcoming funding crunch on and off.
That in itself wouldn’t be worthy of note given the economic crisis now faced by the entire journalism industry, nonprofit or for profit. For an independent newsroom like BINJ, going broke periodically—and soldiering on despite that fact—is such a common occurrence that it’s hardly worth dwelling on.
What is worth discussing is that one of our longtime donors, who prefers to remain anonymous, stepped up and donated $50,000 last week to keep BINJ going until our big annual NewsMatch fundraiser in November and December. Which is amazing and humbling and makes us want to work harder than ever publishing news and views of the day covering Boston and Massachusetts.
So you won’t see any of my BINJ colleagues and I feeling the need to declaim about organizational poverty in print, video, or in person for the next few months.
And we’re not in a fundraising period right now. But know that any amount any of our readers can donate always makes a difference.
True, it’s best if people provide us financial support during that big annual fundraiser, when each dollar you donate usually gets us at least two additional dollars from other backers.
Yet it’s also true that there’s no time like the present to back BINJ’s investigative reporting … and our internship program that helps train, and pay, over 60 young journalists each year.
You all know the drill: Monthly donations help us the most. $15/month helps us pay for one intern article per year. $25/month helps us pay for an article from the ranks of our professional journalists. $50/month helps us pay for a serious investigative article. $100/month pays for a major investigation. $500/month covers nearly a half month of general BINJ costs. And $1,000/month covers almost a full month of our expenses.
If you believe, as we do, that journalism is the “fourth estate” of democracy, it should be clear that a donation at any of those levels makes a significant difference to our ability to cover critical Bay State beats like local and state government transparency, the ongoing opioid crisis, and the dire need for reform of the parole system that don’t get covered sufficiently anywhere else and is therefore worth your consideration.
Beyond that, if you or friends or family can give at the level of this month’s BINJ benefactor or above and are thinking about doing so, drop us an email at info[at]binj[dot]com and we’ll be happy to meet and chat.
Big thanks to this month’s big donor and to all our supporters. We couldn’t have kept publishing for the last 11 plus years without you. And you all inspire us to keep moving BINJ onward and, one hopes, upward.
Click here to make a donation to BINJ!
Jason Pramas is executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and editor-in-chief of BINJ.News.
