After GOOD magazine fired most of its editorial staff in early June, the axed staffers decided they wanted to produce one more magazine issue together. The eight friends turned to Kickstarter to fund Tomorrow, described in their pitch as “a one-shot magazine about creative destruction.”
The Kickstarter went live on Monday. It met its $15,000 goal in less than five hours, which resident Kickstarter expert Alysia Santo tells me is extremely unusual, especially for a print project. Journalists including Jessica Valenti, Felix Salmon, and Ezra Klein were among the donors, says Tomorrow staffer (and friend) Megan Greenwell, who is delighted with the rapid fundraising.
“A few minutes after we initially tweeted it out, I refreshed the Kickstarter page and was thrilled to see we had our first $5,” Greenwell writes in an email to CJR.
I went to wash my cereal bowl, came back, and it was at $3,000 or so. After a couple of hours of constant refreshing, I decided this was an unhealthy thing to be doing and I wasn’t going to be getting any work done anyway, so [fellow staffer] Dylan [Lathrop] and I went for a hike, and I deliberately left my iPhone in the car. When we got back after about 90 minutes in the park, we checked and both burst out laughing on the sidewalk because we had already hit the goal.
The Kickstarter runs until July 25, and donations beyond the original target will be used to pay freelance contributors, make the magazine fancier than originally planned, and to fund a launch party (the party for the last issue of GOOD was held the night before the staffers were fired).
“It’s such a gift to get to do that with such broad community support,” Greenwell writes.
