Bravo! Hit Third Fundraiser Target, Well on Our Way to the Fourth: Guest Bloggers

Thanks to the prompt responses of over 737 members of the Naked Capitalism community, we’ve met our first hurdle, our essential budget for IT support and defenses, the second target, supporting the comments section, and the third, funding to continue our expanded Links section (and meetups if some semblance of the old normal returns) at a healthy clip

As of 8 PM EST, we’ve already $6,860 towards our fourth target, $22,000 of funding for guest bloggers.

As long-standing readers know, over the years, we’ve been improving the caliber of writers who contribute to Naked Capitalism. We like to send our mainstays, Lambert, Jerri-Lynn Scofield, and Nick a significant honorarium out of the fundraiser. We work on the old Wall Street partnership model: a thin level of assured pay, and then bonuses that reflect, on the generous side, their and the site’s performance that year. They’ve each stepped up in a very big way to shift their coverage, both the focus and the level of output, to match the stresses of the Covid outbreak.

Where would you be without Lambert helping keep our collective sanity by DJing debate open threads? He’s also continued his biosphere coverage, such as the biosphere (soil, rivers, lakes, mangroves, coral, plagues of locusts, etc.) and is lodging the occasional review, recently of Dune and the needing-to-be-handled-with-kid-gloves Covid “history” by Scott Gottlieb. Jerri-Lynn has done original reporting on the war on plastics and right to repair, and continues to provide legal analysis on important decisions, such as the opioid settlements and glyshophate litigation. Nick has greatly expanded our international coverage, for instance with political/economic developments in Mexico and on banking stresses in Italy and emerging markets.

Even though we pay our contributors for helping fill this site’s regular schedule at a good level, writing isn’t a very well remunerated line of work. Our guest bloggers regularly turn out in-depth analysis quickly, but the fact that they can do so is a result of their considerable experience and expertise.

We’d also like to send monetary “thanks yous” to Thomas Neuburger and John Siman, whose combo book reviews/author interview are not only popular but also earned him the Kukula Award for non-fiction reviews in 2020, and to sites whose work we feature regularly.

Readers continue to send us humbling notes. From Greg B:

I hold you and your team in the highest regard.

I found you when I was just finding my stride as a mortgage broker as the meltdown started happening. Naked Capitalism helped me help so many clients then and now and I have never stopped reading you every day.

I bow deeply to your commitment and contribution to our society and the world.

Thank you and with love.

And Amy P:

​Even though my college degree was in economics, NC has provided the real education in this subject. Unexpectedly, this year NC and the commentariat has also given me the foundation to wade through the muck that is the Medicare plan selection process. Thank you! Long live Naked Capitalism!

And Skip Intro:

As I noted in the comments, NC has got from financial lifesaver in the GFC to actual lifesaver in the Covid era. I believe the NC process is unparalleled for extracting reality from the miasma of disinformation and professionally curated confusion that dominates our public discourse. One of the few places that adds theory checking to the fact checking, I honestly believe the information I have provided to people, including mask instructions, and non-immunizing vax warnings, have probably saved Covid cases, if not lives.

So we hope you’ll acknowledge our writers’ skills and dedication with a big, generous thank you at the Tip Jar.