Webathon

Matt Welch | 12.5.2023 1:01 PM

Sweet sassy molassy! We started Reason's annual webathon fundraising week last Tuesday with a pretty robust target of $400,000 for supporting our journalism and commentary and jokes with tax-deductible donations as the 2023 calendar winds down. You smashed through that by Day 5. So we hiked the goal all the way up to an almost-unreasonable-sounding $600,000. How did you respond to this distant threshold?

With woodchippers.

As of the maxing out of our latest $80,000 match, the orange box to your right has now been overrun, and we have officially exceeded every past webathon in both nominal and inflation-adjusted terms, except for 2021's ridonkulous $630,000 ($715,000 in 2023's debased currency). Can we get there before the gong strikes midnight?

Well, beloved Reason Trustee Kerry Welsh (no relation) and lovely wife Helen Welsh have ponied up yet another matching grant, this time for $25,000, so anything's possible. That is, if you….

CONTRIBUTE TO REASON'S HISTORY-MAKING WEBATHON RIGHT THE FARK NOW!

Let's give you some final reasons for the Reason season. On Saturday, I linked to a bunch of Reason-staffer social media threads bragging about their work of the past 12 months. Add to those four more: from me, Eric Boehm, Fiona Harrigan, and Liz Wolfe.

Speaking of Wolfie, many of you in your donation comments singled out her stewardship of the recently revamped Reason Roundup. Two of several samples:

The new Reason Round Up has been great….I enjoyed doing my own research. I often do not have the time, the Reason Roundup gives me the opportunity to go in depth by clicking every article and link if I happen to be in that headspace; or read a well thought out synopsis from a libertarian perspective.

[T]he addition of Liz Wolfe has been transformative! Her wit and incisive commentary on the day's news is truly "can't miss" content. She's got a knack for assembling interesting, varied content that lengthens my short attention span.

The good news—and yet another reason why you should donate right the hell today!—is that we have heard your feedback and are adding newsletters to the Roundup/Rattler/New at Reason.com/Reason Alert/NYC Events stable right and left. For instance, just today we have inaugurated a brand new weekly zoning/housing/regulation newsletter by Christian Britschgi titled Rent Free. In the near future we'll debut another one by Robby Soave on "free speech, social media, and why everyone in the media is wrong everywhere all the time" (these quotes direct from Katherine Mangu-Ward on Slack). There will also be a new one from recently returned from maternity leave Elizabeth Nolan Brown, "devoted to sex, tech, and whatever the hell else ENB wants to write about" (again, KMW).

Go to our Newsletters page, click on the boxes that interest you (including a half-dozen info-rich newsletters coming from the Reason Foundation's ace policy specialists), and then await news of how we are converting your donations into more (and more easily consumed) libertarian journalism. Yum!

PLEASE DONATE TO REASON LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW!