This is not a full-blown e-Newsletter with my usual meanderings about where I have been and what I’ve been thinking. I just don’t have the time because, frankly, the pace of our work as 2009 ends is nothing less than frenetic. This intensity comes partly from the fact that NPQ is trying to cover the most recent news stories among and around nonprofits and the communities they serve and that scene, as you well know, is wildly unpredictable—even chaotic. New things are emerging and old things are fading in so many different fields. Nonprofits—right now—are all about transfiguration. But the other reason why our work at NPQ is so charged right now is that one of the fields that is changing most radically and quickly is publishing.

The ever-closing connection between nonprofits and journalism is discussed in our fascinating interview with Mark Jurkowitz of the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism, which appears in our Fall 2009 issue. We are linking to it today because it is a piece that is all about the anxiety inducing, chaotic, even dangerous and yet enormously exciting nature of profound change, and it is a good way to look forward to 2010. And, of course, because the health of a strong Fourth Estate is critically important to our democracy. That said, I want to wish all of you a quiet day or two in the next few weeks and I want to ask you to read my very important postscript after you read the Jurkowitz article.

Meanwhile, do not neglect to support NPQ (your intrepid nonprofit publisher) with a paid subscription. As Dolly Parton says “It takes a lot of work to look this cheap!”