The left-leaning magazine The American Prospect needs a benefactor, and quickly: It's short in its funding, according to The Huffington Post's Michael Calderone, and needs $500,000 just to stay open past the end of May. It's also trying to raise another half million in 2012 support through the end of June. If The Prospect has your email address, you can expect to get hit up for a donation. Calderone writes:

Prospect editor Kit Rachlis told The Huffington Post that the magazine is now "making an all-points effort to fill that gap with individual donors, institutional donors, as well as readers and subscribers."

But a million dollars is a lot to raise incrementally from subscribers and small donors, especially in just two months. The magazine's going to need to land a big donor or two to round out its goal, and it doesn't have much time to do so.

Calderone points out that Facebook's Chris Hughes bought The New Republic last month, but The American Prospect isn't for sale, so much as it's broke. What the magazine really needs is somebody like Ruth Lilly, who gave $100 million to the Poetry Foundation, or Joan Kroc, who left more than $200 million to NPR. A million dollars is a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket compared with those gifts. The problem for The Prospect is the insanely tight deadline it has to find someone who'll make that drop. At least it's got a burgeoning "Save The American Prospect" Twitter campaign underway.

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Adam Martin