For Release: December 8, 2003
Contact: Richard Reynolds
415/321-1740

Mother Jones Marks 10th Anniversary Online

Mother Jones magazine has now been online for 10 years. The magazine launched its website in November 1993, the same month that Wired magazine went online, and a full year before most other news organizations. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications' "What's New Archives" -- which tracked website launches from June 1993 through June 1996 -- show only a few technical publications launching in 1994. Not until 1995 do other general interest news organizations begin to appear, including American Journalism Review, Esquire, Money magazine, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.

At first, the site offered only content from the print magazine, but in July 1995 Mother Jones obtained a leaked list of 159 early donors to GOPAC, Newt Gingrich's secretive political action committee, and posted an annotated database of those contributors on the site. The Washington Post reported that the Federal Election Commission used the database in its investigation of GOPAC.

A range of ambitious web-based projects followed, leveraging the Internet's unique capabilities for journalistic purposes.  A 1995 database of all contributions to federal elections campaigns for the 1994 elections was dubbed "a great use of this capacity" by Newsweek. It was followed by four Mother Jones 400 databases, tracking the major individual contributors to federal elections; a popular "Action Atlas" on coral reefs, which tracked the status of reefs around the world; and "Debt to Society," a 2001 project that tracked the prison populations of all 50  states over the 20 years from 1980 to 2000.

The site offered extensive coverage of the Kosovo conflict, including a series of on-the-scene reports on the bombing of Belgrade written by a U.S.-trained physicist living there.

Several stories published on the Mother Jones website have made national news, including a 1998 story that led to an obstruction of justice complaint being filed against Kenneth Starr and a 2002 story that revealed details of an annuity that assures Enron CEO Ken Lay and his wife a $900,000/year retirement cushion, free from any legal judgments. A story on voters mistakenly purged from the Florida polls published the day after the 2000 elections played a pivotal role in inspiring Greg Palast's best-seller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Mother Jones Interactive was initially run on a Sun 3/50 with a SCSI disk housed in a shoebox.  The site was renamed the MoJo Wire in 1995 and MotherJones.com in 2001. Today MotherJones.com offers a five-day-a-week Weblog called the Daily MoJo, original content, and special projects, as well as magazine content going back to 1993.  MotherJones.com will be providing extensive coverage of the 2004 elections.

MotherJones.com has won numerous citations and has been a finalist for Webby, Online News Association, and Investigative Reporters & Editors awards.