Capitol Hill Blue is considered the oldest political news site on the internet. It began as a one-page weekly report on Oct. 1, 1994, and hopes to celebrate its 29th anniversary later this year. From the beginning, we have tried to present news from a non-partisan way, looking for facts on either side of the political spectrum that reports misuse or criminal activity within our government. We don’t always succeed, but the goal remains.
We’ve also tried to do so without requesting support from our readers: No fund-raising drives, no subscriptions, and no gimmicks. We accept ads, but they are never intrusive. We won’t find ads, for example, between paragraphs of a story. No popup ads appear. The ad services tell us that doing so would increase our revenue, but we feel that it would be a nuisance to readers and have resisted.
We began 2023 with inflation eating away at our ability to keep things on track. The ads never paid our full bill and Doug Thompson, our founder, keeps digging into his own pockets to keep Blue, and its discussion board, ReaderRant, on the web.
The New Year has not been kind to him either. At age 75, he walks with a limp from injuries suffered first in a helicopter crash in the early 1970s while on assignment and again in a motorcycle accident in 2012 when he was returning from photographing a high school football playoff game on another assignment for a newspaper.
Earlier this month, he was felled by a serious cellulite and book infection in his left leg that doctors feared they might need to amputate, but saved it while he continues to recover from the infections and related symptoms of COPD, chronic bronchitis and TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) that lingers from the 2012 accident.
Doug Thompson remains on leave from Capitol Hill Blue and his other news and photojournalism duties while he struggles to recover. He absence from us deepens our need for support.
We ask for your support by donating with the button below, which connects to Blue Ridge Photography, LLC, the company he owns that also includes Capitol Hill Blue and other news operations.
We hope to do this as a short-term request until he gets back on his feet (literally) and starts writing again for Capitol Hill Blue and the other clients of his contract journalism operation. We don’t want to go to a subscription-based service. Too many such operations out there already.
Please help us with a donation of any amount you can by clicking on the “Capitol Hill Blue” image link below. It will take you to the PayPal link of Blue Ridge Photography, Mr. Thompson’s photo business that is also the owner of Capitol Hill Blue:
When we are back on our feet, Mr. Thompson will recognize and thank you publicly and we can continue to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” which would be the goal of any real news operation, political or otherwise.
To contact Mr. Thompson personally, please do so by email or Twitter. Help us keep doing what we’re doing.
