March 31, 2009

Pledge Drive Update

The Baseball Musings Pledge Drive enters its last day with $3290 donated so far. If you’ve been waiting to try to push the drive over the $4000 level, today’s the day to contribute!

Google Analytics reports over 40,000 unique visitors in March. Only a small fraction of those donated. Won’t you join the more than 100 readers who support the site? Five dollars is all it takes. As Josh Levitt wrote:

I am far from a rich guy and I don’t have much to give in comparison to other people. But I check baseball musings several times during the day and I appreciate all the hard work you do on the site. Baseball Musings has quickly become my go to site for baseball information and analysis. I thought it was important to show my appreciation for your hard work and passion in anyway I could.

Recently, the Rocky Mountain New and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped their presses. Bill James recently wrote about the demise of newspapers at Joe Posnanski’s The Future of Newspapers blog:

Eventually the newspapers — as a natural outcome of processes that began in 1836 — became SO big and so expensive that they were dinosaurs, unable to compete with smaller and lighter information providers.

We’re back to 1836 now, in a sense; everybody who wants to has his own “newspaper”, and it’s tough to know who is good and who is reliable and who isn’t, but the same processes are still running. The blogs will get bigger; the good ones are hiring a second helper and a third and fourth, and we’ll spend a century or more sorting things out and re-creating the market. It’s hard, but it’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing.

Instead of spending two or three hundred dollars a year on a newspaper subscription, why not spend five dollars on each of your twenty favorite blogs? Think of each of them as a different section of your paper. Together they provide you with more information at a lower cost.

If you agree with Josh above, if Bill James’s words resonate with you, please consider a donation in any amount. One hundred forty two more readers donating $5 each puts the pledge drive over the top. Fifteen $50 donations accomplish the same thing, with the added benefit of a post dedication. Those donations help buy the stats that keep the Day by Day Database and the Probabilistic Model of Range going. You can use PayPal or ClickandPledge. The latter allows you to use a credit card without signing up for an account.






Online donation system by ClickandPledge

Thank you for reading and for your continued support!

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