October 12, 2007

Friday? Have Some Pie and Music News Day

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Music News

  • Snoop Dogg will be picking up trash and cleaning toilets in an Orange County park as part of his sentence for weapons possession after trying to board a plane with a collapsible baton in his luggage. While Snoop was able to choose his community service option, he was restricted from any choices where he would be “glorified in the eyes of children,” according to the district attorney.

  • Madonna is set to close a ginormous deal with concert promoter Live Nation, in what is being called the first agreement of its kind. The new contract, reportedly worth $120 million, includes payments for three albums as well as tours, and all of this is after she finishes out her contract at Warner, whom she still owes a new album and greatest-hits package. That’s a lotta Madonna.

  • Portishead’s irascible Geoff Barrow apparently disagrees with Radiohead’s recent decision to allow flexible-priced downloads of their new album. He wrote on Portishead’s website, “If you can get our album for nothing or very little, does that mean I can get my boiler fixed for free?” You’re in Portishead, don’t you get everything for free? He also revealed that the band are in the mixing stage of their long-awaited third album, and you’ll get free plumbing with every copy.

  • Kanye West has announced he’s been working on music with Michael Jackson, saying (somewhat defensively) to the London Sun that “If I like…what a person brings to the table then I’ll speak to them,” and then, one can assume, adding, “even if they’re a creepy alleged child molester.” Jackson recently sent a letter to his European fan club telling them to anticipate “exciting and surprising news.” Like anything could surprise us at this point. You can bend spoons with your mind?

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    WE'LL BE BLUNT

    It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

    The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

    Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

    The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

    Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

    And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

    Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

    If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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