Mother Jones

Over the past decade-plus, Mother Jones has shifted from serving a robust, but niche, group of print readers to seeking out and engaging a broad, diverse audience across multiple channels and platforms. As a result of investments in key digital and social channels, we reach an average of 8 to 10 million users per month.

Mother Jones is also a premier training ground, via a respected fellowship, for emerging investigative journalists who receive professional on-the-ground training in fact-checking, scrupulous reporting, and digital media skills of all kinds. The experience of reporting alongside seasoned investigative journalists launches them into careers that have come to span the entire media ecosystem.

Journalism that reaches people on their preferred platforms, that offers deeply reported, factual and relevant information, with context and intelligence, is a crucial tool to strengthen our democracy. MoJo’s dogged reporting on the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, his coddling of extremist groups, and his unprecedented conflicts of interest elevated these issues into public conversation and prompted other newsrooms to begin digging into them too. Our team has focused on voting rights and voter suppression since 2017, helping establish one of the core priorities of those seeking to defend democracy. And a decade ago, when many in the media retreated from covering the climate emergency, we put together a multi-newsroom coalition to ramp up climate journalism; finally, news organizations everywhere are prioritizing this beat. This has always been a defining feature of Mother Jones: looking over the news horizon to give the world a heads-up about what’s coming our way.

For journalism to have an impact, it’s not enough to “build it and they will come”: Our stories need to get out there beyond the choir of news junkies. At MoJo, everyone works to make sure our stories land with the widest possible audience—through other media, via social platforms, and as videos, podcasts, and data visualizations that expand our reach all over the country, across age, gender, race, and ethnicity. On social media, we find that a significant share of our audience doesn’t follow other news sources. They find something in our reporting that speaks to them when other outlets don’t.

Mother Jones focuses on in-depth coverage of the biggest issues facing our country. We deliver news in a variety of platforms and outlets, always endeavoring to meet our readers where they are:

Our print magazine is published bimonthly, shared on newsstands and to 185,000 subscribers, and showcases a mix of longform and investigative pieces, and shorter form reporting and commentary.

An average of 8 million people visit motherjones.com every month where everything from our weekly digital feature, video storytelling, data visualizations, and daily news is published, seven days a week.

We have a combined 2.8 million followers on our social media channels–Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok–where audiences engage with our reporting and reporters, share content, and receive bite-sized news in the form that best suits their needs.

Mother Jones publishes a daily newsletter five days a week to 550,000 subscribers, featuring highlights of the day’s coverage and context for readers to understand the news of the day.

We host a series of live, public events featuring Mother Jones reporters in conversation with experts, politicians, and cultural luminaries that attracted nearly 300,000 views online in 2020.

Mother Jones has one of the deepest and most experienced journalism benches in the business. With 85 staff and fellows organized around our newsrooms in San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York, but located across the country, we have grown from 600,000 readers a decade ago to more than 9 million today. We have transformed ourselves from a print-driven bimonthly to a truly digital-first newsroom–bringing the best in deep, contextual investigative reporting together with a digital-native’s savvy sense of what people are talking and thinking about right now.

The Mother Jones public affairs and audience engagement teams manage a range of projects that aim to broaden the organization’s audience, deepen the relationship with current readers, and demonstrate the nonprofit newsroom’s overall impact. Mother Jones coverage is often cited in Congress, via other national news outlets that build on our reporting, and by organizations doing important policy work on issues including criminal justice, climate change, food and agriculture, and human rights.

We have accomplished all of this thanks to a business model that is powered by reader support: almost two-thirds of our annual budget of $17 million comes from our readers, either as subscriptions or donations (the balance is evenly split between advertising and foundation grants). In fact, we have built one of the largest networks of reader support outside of public broadcasting – more than individual donors.

Combined with additional revenue streams, a nimble advertising operation, and careful budgeting, this hybrid model has enabled us to successfully navigate the disruptive media business, and to thrive and excel in that mission. It also protects Mother Jones from the whims of the market or an unhappy advertiser, and ensures the organization will receive a consistent stream of funding for the long term.

In the midst of what feels like endless election cycles, there are interlocking emergencies—the pandemic, the climate crisis, income inequality—being exploited by purveyors of disinformation and stifling progressive momentum. The threat is enormous, and Mother Jones has crafted our editorial priorities to address the peril that our democracy, our planet, and a just society face.

Protecting Democracy
America is gripped by a massive struggle to determine the fate of democracy. Mother Jones is prioritizing voting rights, disinformation, and extremism to expose the forces trying to prevent fair elections and mislead the public, including corrupt politicians, dark-money groups, social media influencers, and emboldened extremists.
Senior reporter Ari Berman, one of the nation’s premier voting rights journalists, and team relentlessly expose efforts to disenfranchise voters, like undermining a fair census, extreme gerrymandering, or commandeering of local elections boards. Our job is not just to document individual assaults on liberty, but to show how they rely upon, and seek to extend, systemic racism.
Mother Jones is one of the most consistent sources of reporting on the fabulists who populate right-wing media and how social media platforms continue to amplify and weaponize their disinformation. And a team led by Mark Follman—who spearheaded Mother Jones’ decade-long investigation of mass shootings—is tracking the fallout from the Capitol insurrection and documenting how radical antidemocratic ideas and tactics have become mainstream within the GOP.

Climate & Science
The climate crisis is the ultimate intersectional issue—combining our national security interests with the fight for human rights and economic and racial justice. Our climate reporting prioritizes key underreported but high-impact beats and is focused on three core assignments: accountability, solutions and justice.
We cover the political and judicial battles over climate action and the efforts of fossil fuel interests. We also dig into which scientific and policy advances hold the most promise while covering energy transition, food systems, and urban planning, all of which are bound up in racial and economic justice.

Criminal, Gender, & Racial Justice
Mother Jones is known for marquee reporting on policing and incarceration—especially how officers can abuse or kill with impunity, the rights of women in the criminal justice system and private prison profiteers. We’ve reported closely on the ways the pandemic has exacerbated problems, like substandard prison health care, while also pointing to solutions, such as thoughtful decarceration.
We’ll continue a decade-long history exploring the corrosive effects of private prisons on our carceral and immigration systems. We’ll be investigating the racial biases of the child welfare system, the unfair application of justice in sexual assault cases and how communities of color and other grassroots leaders are revolutionizing criminal justice.