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A Year of Milestones for CounterPunch

Photo by OC Gonzalez

We passed the ten-year mark of not having Alexander Cockburn with us. The time has sped by, but there is not a day that we don’t think of him fondly. His energy was infectious. For some of us, our lives were permanently enriched by the time spent with him. His positive energy is undeniable even if he would have never talked about it in those terms. He insisted that one of the problems with the left is that they don’t know how to have fun. For him, fun was a vital ingredient and there were opportunities everywhere! It’s been a few years since the CounterPunch team could all be together but finally, in June we were able to meet in Oregon, have long overdue face-to-face meetings and, in Alex’s honor, have some fun together.

Alex’s jovial presence was there when were uncorking bottles and making toasts to him and the team, and most especially to all of you, our readers, and the worldwide CounterPunch family. For me personally, I passed the 25-year mark of working with CounterPunch. I guess I’m here to stay! I could not imagine working with a better group of people! Jeffrey, Joshua, Deva, Nat, Nichole, and Andrew (in no particular order) are the most lovely, smartest, funniest people I know. I hope you’ll all have the chance to meet them! And maybe you will, because our next mile marker is our 30-year anniversary which we’re gearing up to celebrate on the West coast and you’ll all be invited to join us! Keep an eye out for details around the new year. (interested in attending? Email me directly here.)

At the 30-year mark, CounterPunch has veered insignificantly from its founding blueprints. The mission has remained fundamental: to provide in-depth reporting and commentary, helping readers to make informed assessments on the vital public issues of the day.

Though the mission has remained concrete, changes have been substantial in the steep upward climb of the rising costs of producing the CounterPunch website. Excess is constantly trimmed and operations streamlined to enable the continued dissemination of CounterPunch to the widest and most diverse audience around the globe. When CounterPunch started as a six-page bi-monthly newsletter, the “internet” as we know it today was scarcely fathomable. Today, the website team works around the clock from behind the screens for the virtual CounterPunch world, where you can search all the six-page newsletters or read any of the dozens of new articles each week … search by author or subject or keyword or read the list from top to bottom. Their teamwork keeps it quick-loading, user-friendly, and even printable versions of every article. We never imagined we’d have nearly a million people around the planet reading CounterPunch each month!

The editorial team: Jeffrey, Joshua, and Nat face each day with a mountain of new work: fielding editorial emails and calls, doing their own writing, maintaining their finger on the pulse of the world, cherry-picking and editing the best submissions out of the hundreds they receive each week, readying them for the CounterPunch family: a worldwide community representing nearly every continent on our burning, melting, dying planet. Whether you’ve been reading CounterPunch since its inception, or are new to the site, all of us are connected by our desire to see the bad guys named, social justice flourish, and witness grassroots organizations influence the tides of change, to see the underdog overcome and keep informed so we can do our parts to stall the shitshow we know as life in the 21st century as much as possible.

CounterPunch is truly a reader-supported organization! We don’t seek out or receive corporate-backed foundational support. We’re not grant farmers. We don’t sell real estate on the homepage for advertising. We don’t secretly harvest your information to sell. We rely 100% on our readers’ generosity, and it seems to work out well if everybody donates what they can afford. We’ve tried to make it as painless as possible with every type of donation method you’ve asked for, ready to painlessly make the donation. More information can be found on this page on the website and even more on this page of how you can support CounterPunch and keep the site online another year!

With Sincere Gratitude,

Becky Grant