Dear 3QD Reader,
An NPR program that I admire very much is Christopher Lydon’s Open Source. Their content dovetails nicely with many of our own fascinations and obsessions at 3QD, and they are a key player in the dissemination of interesting and important ideas. I have met Chris Lydon, and found him a remarkably intelligent and decent person. I urge you to try and help him out as best you can. See this email from him:
Nobody but you can get Open Source out of a jam.
We’re launching a week-long appeal for support, passing the hat to sustain “the blog with a radio show.”
For Open Source these last two years, it’s taken a global community to build a conversation.
And now we need you as never before: every listener, every guest, everyone who’s ever downloaded a podcast or flavored the site with a comment.
With your encouragement and robust participation, Radio Open Source has become one of the most talked-about experiments in public media — a civil union of online and on-air communities that trust each other to talk about pretty much anything.
So we’re in this together. And now we’re in a bit of an emergency together.
As you may know, we lost a major funder without warning late last year. The University of Massachusetts, Lowell ended a five-year sponsorship agreement in a political shuffle of chancellors.
We’re an independent, non-profit production company, and it has been no small challenge to try to replace half a million dollars a year in six months. We’ve made some progress — a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, not least — and negotiations are underway with several interesting partners.
So the rescue ships are approaching the harbor, and still the wolf is at the door.
We need your help to keep broadcasting through the summer while we try to ink a deal.
If every listener sent one dollar, we’d have more than enough. If just the registered users on our site sent $100 on average, we’d be way over the top. And if you forward this appeal to your ten best friends, we’ll have a vastly bigger base to draw on.
We hope you’ll consider a tax-deductible contribution.
Click here to donate.