When truth is under attack and independent journalism is imperiled, your continued support of the Guardian will help us deliver the stories that matter most

I came to the US from London in April to begin my new job as editor of the Guardian in America. My arrival coincided with a historic moment for the country: the opening of the nation’s first memorial to lynching victims – a harrowing installation created by the Equal Justice Initiative (spearheaded by the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson) to honor the thousands of black Americans killed by extrajudicial mobs up until the 1950s.

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I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to join a team of Guardian journalists working on a two-day project reporting live on the monument’s opening. Stevenson’s conviction is that slavery didn’t end in 1865: it evolved into lynching, then segregation and then into a modern dystopia where 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated and African Americans are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites. Less an American dream, more an American nightmare. These are the stories that we need to keep telling. And with your support, we can.

A city that served as both the capital of the Confederacy and the bedrock of the civil rights movement proved a fitting place to think about the Guardian’s wider mission in America – about how to harness the power of stories to challenge injustice and inspire hope.

At a time when independent, fact-based, trustworthy journalism is under attack, we can’t accomplish this without your continued support. Today, we’re launching our year-end fundraising appeal, asking you, our readers in America, to help us raise $1m by the new year. Your contributions will help us investigate, uncover and shed light on the under-reported issues facing America in 2019. Small or big, every single contribution will get us closer to our goal.

And we want to hear from you. As part of the year-end campaign, we’re inviting our readers to suggest story ideas for 2019 and vote on the topics you care about most. Want more coverage of plastic pollution? Think we should be writing more about the ethics of big tech or LGBTQ rights? Let us know. In January, we will announce several story ideas proposed by readers that our team will tackle in the new year.

Before moving to America, I oversaw the Guardian and the Observer’s coverage of how Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of millions of Facebook users, using it to try and influence the 2016 presidential election. This story took over a year of slow, painstaking investigative reporting by Carole Cadwalladr and led to congressional hearings in the US and inquiries by the British parliament. Reader support made that possible.

So too did our independence. We are not beholden to shareholders, and our editorial independence means we are free to pursue even the most difficult investigations, and the most vexed issues. Our goal is to hold institutions and individuals to account. And we do that on your behalf.

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We also strive to shift the focus away from Washington, and elevate the voices of those from outside the corridors of power. In 2018, we invited the student journalists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, to guest-edit our site and run our coverage of the March for Our Lives. We also invited teachers to help us record, over a three-day period, the crisis in America’s schools, where low pay and lack of funding sparked nationwide activism.

And in a year of extreme weather events, we reported with vigor on the realities of America’s changing climate, and also highlighted the refusal of the White House to meaningfully engage with an impending catastrophe. We returned to Puerto Rico a year on from Hurricane Maria in a series called The Forgotten Americans, asking how these US citizens could have been failed so systematically. Giving voice to those without one was a key part of what we strived to do in 2018. With your support we can carry on doing that in 2019.

In addition to giving voice to the less heard, we also sought to focus on issues and themes which merited repeated attention. Trump’s takeover – and politicization – of the courts (perhaps his enduring legacy); everyday racism in America, the politics of big tech, the role of big money in US politics and culture; race and sports; and America’s war on democracy (from voting rights to voting suppression) are all stories that need repeated telling. With your continuing support, we can carry on doing that in 2019.

These are frightening times for the planet, America and the free press – but we’re in this together. We do rely on your support and your encouragement. And there are reasons for hope, from the inspiring wave of youth activism around gun violence to the movement against sexual harassment, and from a new dynamism and activism on the American left to the most diverse (and yet still nowhere near diverse enough) Congress in American history that took shape after the recent midterms.

We believe that stories have the power to drive change and build hope. That change is founded on stories that are empirically sourced, and emphatically delivered. As we look forward to 2019, we hope you’ll take action to support the independent press with a year-end gift to the Guardian. And thank you to everyone who has supported the Guardian so far. We can’t do this without you.