May 24, 2010

NPR Geeks Out to Lady Gaga (video)

Flickr/ <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/plumdecheval/4270990159/in/photostream/">PlumeDeChevalOrange Acid</a> (Creative Commons)

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Not only does this video let you match faces to the disembodied radio voices of NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg and NPR White House Correspondent Ari Shapiro (no relation to George W. Bush’s press secretary), but you also get to watch them rock out to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” the first single off her second album The Fame Monster. Bob Boilan’s favorite moment is the Robert Siegel bit, so he tells readers on his All Songs Considered blog.  What part do you like best? 

 

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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.

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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.

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