My name is Michael Sherrard, and I’m Chief Digital Officer at The Intercept.

I want to pull back the curtain for a moment and share a little inside info on how The Intercept operates and, critically, how we’re funded.

The Intercept is a nonprofit news outlet founded 12 years ago with major investment from a visionary philanthropist. That initial support allowed us to publish incredibly ambitious investigative journalism without taking advertising or putting up a paywall.

But over time, that initial investment tapered down — as was always the plan — and this year, for the first time ever, we are relying entirely on reader support.

This is where the rubber meets the road, and some didn’t expect that The Intercept could survive relying so heavily on reader donations. Almost no one in nonprofit journalism has been able to build a powerhouse newsroom like ours entirely on reader support. But so far, we’re proving everyone wrong, and we’re producing some of the most high-impact investigative reporting we’ve ever published.

Still, the bottom line is simple: If readers don’t donate, The Intercept will not survive.

This is our fall fundraising campaign, and we have a mission-critical goal of raising $410,000 by midnight tonight — and so far we’re still almost $40,000 short. That’s not a nice-to-have number; it’s what we need to keep our newsroom running.

If you value the independent investigative reporting of The Intercept, please chip in $5, or whatever you can, now to help make our fall fundraising drive a success.

Thank you,