Clara Jeffery Quotes
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Vision is an important part of being a good editor, but so is teamwork and grace.
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We started out covering income inequality in the magazine Mother Jones, but that ongoing body of work positioned - and sourced - us well to put both Occupy and the 47 percent in context.
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We love the flexibility that print and digital formats give us, and diving deep on a print feature can be one step in a longer project that generates a lot of digital stories.
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We made an amazing video about Newtown's struggle to figure out what to do with all the letters and art sent to the town.
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We also had a beautiful feature where the writer used the story of two mentally ill relatives, one of whom killed his dad, to explore the history of how we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, only to re-institutionalize them - but in jails and prisons. There's much more to come.
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Broadly speaking, in the past few years, we've more than doubled the editorial staff in Mother Jones, as part of ramping up daily operations that have resulted in huge gains in audience, a slew of awards, new multimedia endeavors, and of course scoops like the 47 percent.
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Print works! It works as a business proposition - our print readers of the Mother Jones not only provide revenue in the form of subs and ads, but they are a core part of our donor community; 10 percent give us a donation on top of their subscription; that's about the same rate as NPR gets from its listeners.
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We do a lot of "capital I" important stories, but one I'd highlight is the work we've done on guns, not only for the acclaim it's gotten but also because it showcases all the different kinds formats we use. So we compiled a database of all the variables of all the mass shootings in America - work the government doesn't do, thanks to the NRA - which allowed us to surface patterns and make data visualizations of it.
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It is a great vehicle for storytelling, especially for a certain kind of exhaustively reported, painstakingly fact-checked, and beautifully produced narrative.
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We've investigated the gun lobby and its political donations and how it spread the Stand Your Ground laws from Florida.