Earlier this year the Progressive magazine celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Now the publication is asking readers to donate $90,000 by the end of the month to stay alive.

Matthew Rothschild, the magazine’s editor and publisher, says he’s confident the money will come in to meet payroll and pay printing, mailing, mortgage and other expenses.

But magazine expert Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi, says the 11th-hour appeal signals a tough future for the Madison-based publication.

“If you need $90,000 now you’re in big trouble,” Husni said. “You can’t tell me that you need $90,000 now but after two weeks you’re in good shape.”

Founded by Sen. Robert La Follette in 1909, the Progressive has developed a national reputation as a scrappy monthly journal known for opposition to corporate power and U.S. military intervention across the globe while championing civil liberties and left-wing causes.

Its anniversary celebration here in May drew actor and environmental activist Robert Redford as the keynote speaker along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and others.

With a history intertwined with the city’s, the Progressive’s leftist voice is one “a lot of people in Madison pay attention to,” said Katy Culver, a journalism teacher at UW-Madison.

The magazine has 46,500 paid subscribers, Rothschild said.

Rothschild issued the appeal Monday, saying in a letter and in a posting on the magazine’s Web site that the magazine had only $40,000 of the $130,000 it needed to “keep going” by paying its bills and meeting payroll at the end of the month.

He said one person has been laid off, other employees have had their hours reduced and staff members have taken pay cuts.

In the first 36 hours after the appeal went out, the magazine raised $12,000 and received other pledges — a comforting response that makes Rothschild believe the magazine will survive, he said.

“The readers of the Progressive won’t let the Progressive die,” Rothschild said. “That’s the story of this little magazine for the last 100 years.”

But Husni said the Progressive and other political magazines will always have financial trouble without a consistent form of revenue, notably the interest earnings on an endowment.

He cited Harper’s, a liberal magazine supported by the independent Harper’s Magazine Foundation. Rothschild said the Progressive doesn’t have a foundation that generates interest income.