I’m Mike Dang, editor-in-chief of Longreads.
Today we’re launching the 2017 Longreads Member Drive with the goal of raising $25,000 from readers by November 16. All of this money will go directly into a story fund that’s used to support work from veteran and emerging writers, photographers, and illustrators from all around the world.
In addition, for every dollar you give, WordPress.com will generously match with $3. This means that if we raise $25,000, we have the potential to add $100,000 to our story fund for upcoming writing and investigative projects. This is why your support during our drive is so crucial.
Some of our upcoming stories include:
- A look at how the wrongfully convicted have been affected by divergent state policies on compensating exonerees for their time in prison.
- Reporting from a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh.
- An examination of the role toy guns have played in police shootings.
- A two-part series on the humanitarian crisis involving Haitian refugees stranded on two ends of the U.S. border.
- A dispatch from the DefCon hacker convention, where it was demonstrated that voting machines could be easily compromised.
- A report on a man building a life for himself after being imprisoned for 19 years and deported to Mexico by ICE on release.
Each of these stories takes months to report, edit, and produce, and they don’t come cheap. They often include the hard work of people who aren’t in the limelight—people like Matt Giles, who heads our fact-checking department, Abby Royle, who does careful transcriptions, and a number of local translators and stringers who help us do our work. Your support goes to all of these people and is helping to make Longreads become one of the best places for long-form journalism to survive and thrive.
I hope you’ll give us your support during our member drive. Remember, because of WordPress.com’s generous match, every dollar you give us will make a big impact.
Check out our Member page for more great perks—like ad-free reading and tote bags.
Thanks for reading!
— Mike Dang
Editor-in-chief, Longreads