Information about Mother Jones (magazine)

Mother Jones
Mother Jones, cover dated September/October, 2006 Mother Jones, cover dated September/October, 2006
Editor-in-Chief	Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery
Categories	Politics
Frequency	Bimonthly
Circulation	233,000
Publisher	Foundation For National Progress
First issue	February 1976
Company	Foundation For National Progress
Country
Language	English
Website	Mother Jones
ISSN	0362-8841

Mother Jones is an independent, nonprofit magazine rooted in what it terms progressive political values and known for its investigative reporting. In general United States standards it is a magazine of Left-wing politics orientation. The winner of a 2001 National Magazine Award in General Excellence, Mother Jones has been nominated for National Magazine Awards twelve times and has won four times.

With a paid circulation of 233,000 (the average for the first half of 2006), Mother Jones is the most widely read progressive publication in the United States. Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery serve as co-editors.

The magazine was named after Mary Harris Jones, a.k.a Mother Jones, a union activist, active opponent of child labor, anarchist, and self-described "hellraiser". Its stated mission is to produce revelatory journalism that in its power and reach informs and inspires a more just and democratic world.

Mother Jones is published by the Foundation for National Progress, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Mother Jones and the FNP are based in San Francisco.

Key editors

For the first five years of its history, Mother Jones operated with an editorial board, and members of the board took turns serving as managing editor for one-year terms. People who served on the editorial team during those years included Adam Hochschild, Paul Jacobs, Deborah Johnson, Jeffrey Klein, Carol Polsgrove, Mark Dowie, Amanda Spake, Zina Klapper, and Deirdre English.

In 1981 Deirdre English was named the magazine’s first editor-in-chief, a position she held until 1986. A strong feminist, she brought women’s voices to the fore in the magazine and oversaw considerable coverage of Central America, the Sandinistas, and the Contras. She also brought in Barbara Ehrenreich as a regular columnist.

Michael Moore followed English and edited Mother Jones for several months. After being fired in the fall of 1986, Moore sued Mother Jones for wrongful termination and settled with the magazine’s insurance company for $58,000. Moore did not have a chance to shape a direction he had in mind for the magazine. Many of the articles that were printed during his time as editor were articles that had already been commissioned by Deirdre English. An article by Paul Berman about Nicaragua, which was slightly critical of the Sandinistas, (Mother Jones generally supported the Sandinistas) was one of those articles commissioned by English. Moore did not want to print it, but the magazine had made a commitment to Berman. The Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn believed the disagreement over the Berman article was the sole reason of the firing, but Hochschild and others at the magazine denied this.^[1][2] Books about Moore by Jesse Larner (Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left) and Roger Rapoport (Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast) extensively cover Moore's difficult relationships with people during his brief editorship.

Douglas Foster, an Emmy-winning TV producer and a writer who had covered labor issues for Mother Jones in the 1970s, followed Moore. Foster’s magazine featured regular columns from Molly Ivins, Roger Wilkins, and Ralph Nader. During his tenure, the magazine excerpted Randy Shilts' groundbreaking book, "And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic."

In the fall of 1992, Jeffrey Klein, one of the original editorial team, returned as editor-in-chief, bringing an intense focus on Washington politics, including extensive coverage of Newt Gingrich, campaign finance, and the tobacco industry. He was a frequent guest on radio and television shows, spearheaded many collaborations between the magazine and website, and brought comedian Paula Poundstone on as a regular columnist.

Roger Cohn succeeded Klein as editor-in-chief in 1999. Cohn brought to the fore environmental and social justice stories from around the country. It was during his tenure that the 25-year-old Mother Jones won a 2001 National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

Russ Rymer was named editor-in-chief in early 2005, and under his tenure the magazine published more essays and extensive packages of articles on domestic violence (July/August 2005)[1], and the role of religion in politics (December 2005).[2]

In August 2006, Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery were promoted from within to become co-editors of the magazine. Bauerlein and Jeffery, who had served as interim editors between Cohn and Rymer, were also chiefly responsible for some of the biggest successes of the magazine in the past several years, including a package on ExxonMobil's funding of climate change "deniers" (May/June 2005) [3] that was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Public Interest reporting; a package on the rapid decline in the health of the ocean (March/April 2006) [4], and the magazine's massive Iraq War Timeline interactive database. [5]

The first post-baby boomer editors in the history of Mother Jones, Bauerlein and Jeffery have used a new investigative team of senior and young reporters to increase original reporting, web-based database tools, and blog commentary on MotherJones.com. The cover of their first issue (November 2006) asked: "Evolve or Die: Can humans get past denial and deal with global warming?"[6][7]

Effective end of October 2007, David Corn, a political journalist and former Washington editor for The Nation, will serve as chief of the magazine's newly established D.C. bureau[8]. Other D.C. staff include Washington Monthly contributing editor Stephanie Mencimer, former Village Voice correspondant James Ridgeway and Laura Rozen from the American Prospect.

MotherJones.com

Mother Jones began posting its magazine content on the Internet in November 1993, the first general interest magazine in the country to do so. A number of innovative uses of this new medium would follow. In the March/April 1996 issue, the magazine published the first Mother Jones 400, a listing of the largest individual donors to federal political campaigns. In the print magazine, the 400 donors were listed in order with thumbnail profiles and the amount they contributed. On MotherJones.com (then known as the MoJo Wire) the donors were listed in a searchable database.

Winner of the 2005 and 2006 “People’s Choice” Webby Award for politics, MotherJones.com has provided extensive coverage of both Gulf wars, presidential election campaigns, and other key events of the last decade. The site has also produced extensive special reports on the U.S. prison system and the state of the planet’s coral reefs.

In addition to stories from the print magazine, MotherJones.com offers original online content five days a week, including reported stories and the MoJo Blog. In the 2006 election, Mother Jones' website was the first to break stories on the use of robocalling [9], a story that was then picked up by TMP Muckraker and The New York Times. Mother Jones' Iraq War Timeline interactive database [10] is the latest big interactive online project.

Mother Jones Radio

Launched on June 19, 2005, Mother Jones Radio was heard on Air America Radio Sundays at 1:00 p.m. EST. The one-hour show was hosted by Angie Coiro and featured interviews and commentaries inspired by stories from Mother Jones. Mother Jones Radio ended its production in early 2007.

Notes

External links

• MotherJones.com
• The Foundation for National Progress
• Mother Jones Radio
• Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline