Little Scamp Causes Full Minute of Dead Air on NPR on Take Your Child to Work Day

Devoted NPR listeners on the West Coast may have noticed a sudden minute-long drop-off of audio during this morning’s broadcast of Morning Edition. The reason: Today is Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day, and some rascal was messing around with the control board.

This afternoon, Gawker was forwarded an email that had been sent from an NPR engineer to a listserv of fellow employees, describing a son or daughter who managed an impressive act of sabotage during a studio tour this morning.

“One of our junior journalists was some how able to press the exact sequence, and perfectly timed live insert panel to insert studio 42 into the stream 1. I kid you not” the email read. “Feel free to giggle at will.”

According to the email, thanks to the “junior journalist,” the signal went dead on certain NPR stations at 11:04 today and stayed that way for one minute and 13 seconds. Isabel Lara, NPR’s director of media relations, confirmed the outage to Gawker, declining to say how many stations were affected. “During a bring your kids to work day tour today, some of our junior visitors pressed some buttons that affected a portion of the 11 AM ET newscast that can be heard on a limited number of West Coast stations Not all stations were affected,” she wrote in an email. “It was an educational day for us as well as our kids.”

We feel your pain, NPR. We had an office full of kids at Gawker today, too, and it is only by the grace of the blog gods that the place didn’t come tumbling to the ground. Mostly, we just talked sports and politics with them, and pretended to roll over dead when they pointed their Nerf guns at us.
http://gawker.com/little-scamp-causes-full-minute-of-dead-air-on-npr-on-t-1773672095