"The Globe and Mail is moving to charge readers for its online content, following a trend established by the New York Times and other major publications." Steve Ladurantaye - Globe and Mail, May 10, 2012

The headline says it all - "Globe to charge readers for online content." This news is not really that surprising. It is true of course that producing media and presenting news to the world costs money - a lot of money. Corporate media is going the way of fees and media is getting increasingly owned by a handful of corporations.

Welcome back Derrick! Veteran freelance journalist, author, and community activist Derrick O'Keefe has returned to rabble.ca as the new Editor. 

Target's coming up! Almost... there... almost... there. OK rebel leaders, we need just a couple more thousand to reach our goal of $15,000 for our winter donation drive, which ends Feb 29. Fire away with your donation today and keep rabble.ca fighting the good fight. Get your donation in now to be entered into the draw for some great prizes, including a $500 camera shop gift certificate.

$4,000. That's the money we need to reach our goal of $15,000 for our winter donation drive. We're pretty close. In fact, if 80 people give us $50, we're done! Eighty people -- that's less than 0.0005 per cent of the people who will visit rabble.ca this month.

Can you help get us to our goal and keep our must-have media site going and growing?

A very sincere thank-you to everyone who has supported rabble during this drive and helped us raise $11,000 so far. Please encourage a friend to join you, which you can do with our "tell a friend" feature.

rabble is a bright light in the dark spaces of mainstream media and a great mechanism for developing community, solidarity, and citizen intelligence ~Anonymous

Ahhh, love letters. We admit, we like a compliment or two and last year when we did our visitor's survey we got some nice notes like the ones in this post. And you know what else warms our hearts? Pledges of support. With Valentine's Day less than a week away we encourage you to show some love and pledge your support to rabble.

I love rabble and trust it more than today's CBC, which is fighting to survive, but making massive compromises in the meantime ~Anonymous

It takes a community to keep community media going. And our community this week involves encouraging words from a dragon, a giving couch, and a no tote bags promise. Please take a listen and share these short (30 sec) promos for rabble.ca's donation drive. We're told they make a good tweet and a nice FB post.

Got a minute or two? For the average reader this blog will take under two minutes to read. Know what else takes just a couple of minutes? Keeping independent media alive. Please pledge right now and support rabble.ca's winter donation drive. It's really quick. You can't even make a decent piece of toast in the time it takes to donate to rabble. A commercial TV break takes longer.

Plus, when you donate you could win a cool prize:

Hey rabble donation drive supporters, now is not the time to be bashful. We are very grateful to everyone that donates to rabble.ca to keep our non-profit, independent media site going.

And you should be proud too. We need you to brag, howl, and shout from rooftops that you contribute to independent media and that together, bit-by-bit, donation-by-donation, news for the rest of us can survive and thrive.

The best things probably do sometimes come in small packages. At rabble.ca we use our small (tiny really) budget to bring news for the rest of us to Canada and the world. We do this through original news articles, blogs, podcasts, video (live and pre-recorded), a moderated discussion board, an "activist toolkit", a Canada-wide events calendar, a book section focusing on Canadian content, newswire, reprints, special "issue" sections, and more. And guess who noticed?