Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Sponsor One of My Articles for $50!

Please support my work!

It’s Day 3 of my quarterly fundraising appeal, in which I take a short break from pounding my typepad into submission with despair at Obama’s cowardice, disdain for US lawmakers and the right-wing judges of the D.C. Circuit Court, and, instead, harangue you, my readers (in the nicest way possible, hopefully) for financial support to supplement my income as an independent investigative journalist. My target is $1,500, and thanks are due to the friends and supporters who have so far donated $540.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. All contributions are welcome, whether it’s $25, $50, $100 or $500, and you can pay via PayPal without even having to log in to the system. As one of my supporters explained, “Just type your details and when they ask you to use PayPal, do not log in. It says, ‘continue without log in.’ Simple. Straightforward.”

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

In an attempt to keep things creative, I’m revisiting a proposal I slipped into a fundraising update yesterday, providing links to the 28 original articles I have written for free for this website since my last fundraising appeal in December. These articles, written in between my regular assignments for my part-time employers at Cageprisoners and the Future of Freedom Foundation, cover some of my usual turf — Guantanamo and torture — but also cover the revolutionary upheavals in the Middle East, the unprincipled assaults on the British state (in the areas of education, welfare, the NHS and much more) that are being undertaken, with indecent haste and relish, by the arrogant, inexperienced and ideologically driven coalition government in the UK, the reawakened stirrings of labor activism in the US, the saga of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and the plight of the alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning.

On the spur of the moment while writing that article, I suggested that readers could, if they wished, cover the otherwise unpaid hours I spent writing these articles (which are published exclusively here on my website, at the rate of two a week, on average) by sponsoring an article that they particularly liked. I was reassured when one supporter immediately offered to sponsor one of these articles, for $50, which now has a note thanking him for his support.

In a way, I suppose, this idea arose out of the “Like”, “Share” and “Retweet” buttons that we encounter all the time in our browsing, crossed with the “Donate” buttons that many of us in the reader-funded new media — as opposed to the advertising-led traditional media — rely on to supplement our income from other sources. I think it could catch on as another way of supporting writers who, all too often, end up unrewarded for their work, so if you want to try it out, please go ahead, and I’ll have you added as a sponsor of your chosen article in no time!

Thanks again for all your support, which I appreciate wholehearedly, whether or not you choose to — or are able — to support me financially. I haven’t forgotten — and I hope I never will — that spreading the word about injustice and encouraging people to take action is in many ways its own reward, and that I’m fortunate to have so many people who follow my work with such great enthusiasm.

Andy Worthington
London
March 11, 2011

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.