October 19, 2007

Friday Implies It’s Music News Day

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  • Rapper T.I. may be in serious trouble after he was arrested in a sting trying to purchase machine guns and silencers. Police also found a half a pound (!) of marijuana in his car. A phalanx of supporters attended a court date in Atlanta today, including up-and-coming hip-hop star Young Jeezy, where T.I. pleaded “not guilty.”

  • Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr was named a Visiting Professor at the University of Salford in Manchester, where he will deliver “a series of workshops and masterclasses to students on the BA Popular Music and Recording degree.” Professor Marr, what do you do if your lead singer is lying about how much he’s paying the drummer and the bassist?

  • The recording industry goes after Usenet for illegal music file-sharing. Usenet. Wasn’t that what all the geeks in the computer lab at college were on back in like 1988? What next, oh record labels: going after on-hold music? Commodore 64 music composition programs? Home taping?

  • A dude in a gas mask freaked Annie Lennox out at a concert in Boulder, Colorado on Tuesday night. Lennox saw the man approaching and fled the stage, later apologizing to fans but defending her reaction, calling the guy “freakish and disturbing.” The man was also wearing, uh, platform boots and a cape. Is this the hot look this season in Boulder?

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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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