We know it has been an aggravating month for many CounterPunch readers. Hitting you up for cold hard cash is a task that makes most of us at CounterPunch squirm. Unfortunately, in order to bring you the best material, seven days a week, including a print magazine, podcast and so much more, we need money to keep the ship afloat. The good news is we are nearing the fund drive finish line, but we aren’t there yet. If we don’t reach our goal we will have to cut back on the amount of material you get for free every single day.
If you are reading this then you know just how important CounterPunch is in a world where corporate media dominates and even alternative media often remains passive and sclerotic — shying away from controversy and complex issues. We know you love CounterPunch because we never cower under fire, and we refuse to sell out to anyone. Even within our own ranks, our writers often disagree, whether it’s issues like Syria or the campaign of Bernie Sanders, yet we remain a place where the broad spectrum of the Left can convene and hash it out. That’s a rare thing nowadays and one of the reasons CounterPunch is so vital. There is a reason why we are the largest lefty outlet in the English language, worldwide.
For the past 20 years my friend Jeffrey St. Clair has been the editorial backbone of CounterPunch. Along with Alexander Cockburn, Jeff truly made the site what it is today – a one-stop shop for your daily dose of intellectual rigor and outrage. He’s been our workhorse and I’m proud to be working with Jeffrey for three years now, and honored to keep Cockburn’s fighting spirit alive. Behind the scenes, Becky and Deva make sure we have everything straight with the IRS, Postal Service, our subscribers — you name it and they get it done. Meanwhile, Nathaniel ensures our social media game is on point, sharing our articles far and wide across the web, growing our readership with every click. For our many readers who are looking for a forum to comment on or critique CounterPunch articles, the Facebook page is the place where you can enter the ring and fight it out.
There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t receive emails thanking us for making CounterPunch a special and unique space for cultural and political discourse. I used to be on the outside looking in as a long-time CounterPunch contributor. I really had no idea the amount of work that went into making sure CounterPunch thrived, but I can assure you, maintaining a website with as much traffic and material as CounterPunch produces is a serious, pricey undertaking. One million unique readers a month gobbles up a lot of bandwidth, and our server hosts don’t give it away for free. Sure, we could use our immense popularity to sell advertisements to pay our bills, but we prefer to keep our site a corporate-free zone, only promoting the books we publish and the ones we enjoy reading. We’d very much like to keep it that way, and we can with your continued support.
If you’d rather donate by mail, please send checks to:
CounterPunch
P.O. Box 228,
Petrolia, CA 95558
Prost!
Joshua Frank
CounterPunch Managing Editor