Company Profile
Foundation for National Progress
Company Overview
Award-winning Mother Jones magazine was founded
by the non-profit Foundation for National
Progress (FNP), to educate the American public
by investigating and reporting on important
social and political issues. The FNP launched
Mother Jones magazine in 1976 and
MotherJones.com in 1993 to bring uncompromising
reporting to a broad national audience.
Company History
The First 25 Years - by Adam Hochschild
Mother Jones' founders envisioned a magazine
devoted to a new brand of socially conscious
journalism - one that took on corporate as well
as political power. Twenty-five years later,
that mission remains as timely as ever. (An
earlier version of this history appeared in
Mother Jones 25th anniversary issue, May 2001.
Since the article was written, paid circulation
of Mother Jones magazine has climbed past
225,000 copies per issue and today
MotherJones.com attracts more than 350,000
visitors every month.)
When the first issue of Mother Jones arrived
back from the printer 25 years ago, the 17 of us
then on the magazine's staff eagerly clustered
around to rip open the boxes and touch and feel
the printed pages at last. We were then working
in cramped quarters above a San Francisco
McDonald's, and the smell of frying burgers
drifted up from below. We would have been amazed
to know that the magazine would still be here,
some 200 issues and several offices later.
Multinationals like McDonald's endure forever,
it seems, while dissenting magazines flare up,
attract a little attention, and then die. While
copies of Mother Jones may not blanket the world
today quite as thoroughly as do Big Macs, more
than 165,000 households will receive the issue
you are reading, and the magazine's Web site
logs 1.25 million page views each month.
None of us here a quarter century ago could have
dreamed of the World Wide Web; in fact, for the
first few years the magazine was even set in hot
type, a 19th-century technology using molten
lead. Look at an early issue of Mother Jones
under a magnifying glass and you'll notice the
subtly irregular pits and flecks in the letters.
Printing purists feel about hot type the way
rail buffs feel about steam engines. But despite
changes in how the magazine is produced, the
causes it covers and its passion for justice are
very much the same.
Mother Jones was born in a time of upheaval. It
was early 1974 when several of us first met in
the San Francisco living room of the late
journalist and activist Paul Jacobs to begin
planning the magazine. We were still living in
the afterglow of the 1960s, when the civil
rights and antiwar movements had put hundreds of
thousands of Americans into the streets, shaken
the country to its core, brought an end to legal
segregation, and helped force U.S. withdrawal
from the bloody, unjust war in Vietnam.
Although these crusades were fragmented or spent
by the early '70s, it was still a heady time
politically. The movements for environmental
protection and for women's rights had just been
born, or, more correctly speaking, reborn. The
language of progressive politics had deepened.
People who dreamed of a more just society now
began to understand that the personal was also
political, and that politics also included the
health of our fragile and much-abused planet. In
a sense, it seemed as if the '60s were still
going on, with new strains of activism in the
air and new political earthquakes to come. We
were, perhaps, a bit too naive about the
remarkable staying power of the American
political and corporate system.
Something else was in the air in 1974. Two
enterprising young Washington Post reporters had
uncovered the Watergate scandal; when Richard
Nixon resigned in August of that year,
investigative journalism had changed the course
of history. For anyone who believed in the power
of the printed word, it was an exhilarating
moment. And in the late '60s and early '70s,
cities throughout the country were giving birth
to alternative newspapers, many with a strong
progressive bent. It was among reporters for
this new generation of weeklies that Mother
Jones found many of its best writers.
Up until that time, American investigative
journalists had traditionally targeted
politicians. We thought the country was ready
for a magazine of investigative re-porting that
would focus on the great unelected power
wielders of our time -- multinational
corporations. And we wanted that reporting to
carry far. That meant it had to be a magazine
that was well written: For our very first issue,
Jeffrey Klein, one of the editors, found a piece
by Li-li Ch'en that ended up winning a National
Magazine Award. It also meant a magazine that
would attract the eye: Louise Kollenbaum, our
art director, designed a publication that would
be a home for first-rate photographs and
artwork. And finally it meant a magazine with
the careful business planning necessary to take
us well beyond the relatively small readership
of the older left-leaning periodicals. Richard
Parker, who worked as both editor and publisher,
saw to it that Mother Jones took the best of
what could be learned from the world of
commercial publishing. Two of the talented young
writers who first appeared in Mother Jones
during the 1970s, Doug Foster and Deirdre
English, each later went on to spend more than
five years as the magazine's top editor.
Once launched, the magazine took about a year
and a half to fully hit its stride. It was clear
when that happened, in the late summer of 1977.
Mark Dowie was business manager of Mother Jones.
In his spare time, he had written and published
one piece in the magazine. One day an insurance
investigator he knew asked him, "Have you heard
about the Ford Pinto?" The Pinto, then the best-
selling subcompact car in America, had a
reputation for bursting into flames when rear-
ended at low speeds. Dowie's investigation
yielded an extraordinary tale. Not only had
Pinto crashes killed at least 500 people and
painfully injured many more, but even before the
first Pintos came off the assembly line, company
engineers had warned management that the gas
tank was dangerously close to the rear of the
car. Ford executives then projected that it
would cost them more money to shut down and
retool their assembly line than to pay off the
damage claims from the anticipated deaths and
injuries. Dowie obtained the memo where they
made these cost-benefit calculations.
Dowie's story won many awards and got repeated
by major newspapers, TV networks, and talk-radio
programs. And that is how many of the magazine's
stories have had the greatest impact: by being
picked up in the establishment media, which are
usually too timid to launch Mother Jones-style
investigations, despite their vastly greater
resources.
The Pinto exposé was also the first time all of
us at the magazine tasted the greatest pleasure
of working at a place like this -- hearing your
enemies denounce you. Pressed by dozens of
reporters for comment, Ford issued a statement
claiming that Dowie's story was all wrong,
filled with "distortions and half-truths."
Several months later, racing to forestall a
government safety hearing, Ford recalled 1.5
million Pintos for repairs.
Not long after this, we were paid a tribute of a
different sort. It had never surprised us that
Mother Jones annoyed repressive governments --
our writers had had copies of the magazine
confiscated from their baggage at Soviet
airports and at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin,
and had been barked at by government officials
and U.S. diplomats in places like El Salvador.
But after a number of our stories irked
authorities in Washington, the Internal Revenue
Service launched an investigation into the
magazine's nonprofit status. And once the Reagan
administration came into office, the probe took
a harsh turn. The IRS claimed that even though
Mother Jones lost money every year, it should
pay taxes on the income it received from sources
like advertising. This vendetta was so absurd
that many mainstream newspapers ran editorials
in our defense. The IRS finally dropped the
case, but not until it had cost us huge legal
bills.
Dozens more corporate exposés followed the Pinto
story. In 1979, a team of writers put together a
prize-winning package of stories on "dumping" --
the unloading on Third World countries of
pesticides, medicines, and other products banned
in the United States as unsafe. The stories'
impact rippled throughout the world, and
lawmakers in three countries introduced bills
outlawing dumping. No one used the word
globalization in those days, but you can't cover
U.S. corporate malfeasance without following the
story abroad. Today that is more true than ever.
In some ways the greatest test any publication
faces is whether it can stick to its ideals
during politically difficult times. Although the
magazine was born in the afterglow of the 1960s,
and hit its stride during the Carter
Administration, the mood of the country turned
markedly against progressive thinking of all
kinds during the 12 long years of the
Administrations of Ronald Reagan and the first
George Bush. Yet Mother Jones, for most of this
period under the leadership of Deirdre English
and then Doug Foster, never wavered from the
course it had set out on years before. It
continued to publish strong corporate exposes,
to speak for the downtrodden, and to attract a
wide range of new writers into its pages, from
Barbara Ehrenreich to Molly Ivins.
Mother Jones has also remained a strong voice
for social justice: Racial discrimination,
women's rights, environmental justice, and the
plight of immigrant farmworkers are all issues
you will find covered in the magazine from its
first year of publication to the present.
Another major theme over the years -- from
investigations of costly, useless weapons
programs in the Carter and Reagan military
budgets to the U.S. Arms Trade Atlas on today's
Mother Jones Web site -- has been the bloated
American military budget and the way the United
States uses its superpower influence overseas.
Although the magazine's values have remained
constant over the last quarter century, the
world it exists in has changed enormously. The
gap between rich and poor has grown wider --
worldwide and in our home city of San Francisco,
where the silicon boom has filled the streets
with SUVs and has pushed rents far beyond what
artists or the poor can afford. And while big
money has always called the tune in American
politics, the money has become bigger than ever
and its influence ever more blatant. In 1996,
the magazine launched the Mother Jones 400, an
investigation of the largest donors to political
campaigns. The latest MoJo 400, which appeared
in the March/April issue, examined the business
sectors that financed the campaign of George W.
Bush -- and what they expected in return.
American journalism has also changed markedly
between 1976 and 2001. Twenty-five years ago an
exposé that showed how a major corporation's
products injured people was certain to outrage
readers; we could be sure hundreds of them would
write to their members of Congress, join a
boycott campaign. But in the electronic age,
people often feel they are drowning in
information. The investigative journalist must
meet a higher standard. He or she must not only
provide crucial detail that cannot be found
elsewhere, but must tell the story in such a way
that readers cannot put the magazine down. And
sometimes even that is not enough to force
citizens or governments into action. Look at the
long delay before Europe and the United States
intervened, ever so reluctantly, in the former
Yugoslavia -- and didn't intervene at all to
stop the genocide in Rwanda.
Since our birth in 1976, control of the American
mass media has become ever more centralized.
When our friend Ben Bagdikian, former dean of
the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley,
published his 1983 book, The Media Monopoly, it
was subtitled A Startling Report on the 50 Corpo-
rations That Control What America Sees, Hears
and Reads. In each subsequent edition, Bagdikian
jokes, he has had to reduce the number of
corporations; it is now down to six. All of this
makes alternative, noncorporate news sources
like Mother Jones more crucial than ever. One
thing you can be sure of is that the magazine
will never be part of AOL Time Warner.
Yet one of this country's great paradoxes is
that new forms of media monopoly and of free
speech evolve at the very same time. If the 17
staff members who cheered the arrival of those
first boxes of Mother Jones had gone to sleep
like Rip van Winkle and then woken up today, one
thing would leave us amazed and cautiously
heartened: the Internet's capacity to bring
dissenting points of view to millions of people
all over the world -- and to enable those people
to communicate with one another. Mother Jones
was part of this process early on, in 1993, when
it became the first general-interest magazine to
publish on the Web.
So what can a Rip van Winkle of today expect in
Mother Jones on its 50th anniversary? Perhaps by
then both paper and computers will have been
replaced by something we cannot even imagine.
But technology is not what matters. One thing is
certain: The world of 2026 will not have seen
the end of injustice, of discrimination, of
poverty, and of political and social violence.
It will still have brave, determined men and
women everywhere who will be fighting to change
all of that. And Mother Jones will be on their
side.
Notable Products / Brands
Mother Jones magazine, MotherJones.com
Notable Accomplishments / Recognition
National Magazine Award - nominations and
awardment. Current nomination for a Webby.
Benefits
The FNP offers a very comprehensive benefit
package including, but not limited to, tax
deferred commuting money, a longevity
recognition program, 11 paid holidays including
employee birthdays, paid parental leave, etc.