Catching Up with The Crasher: Mike Tronnes Discusses Cursor at 10

By |

When Mike Tronnes co-founded the website Cursor.org with Rob Levine, Mike Mosedale and Brad Zellar ten years ago, few of the attention-getting strategies of the internet were at his disposal. Cursor predated Digg and Reddit, RSS was an acronym just being born, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook didn’t yet exist. He had to resort to desperate measures to promote his site. And, brilliantly, he did so in a highly visible way that simultaneously promoted Cursor’s mission of media critique: He’d crash live newscasts, showing up on-screen behind reporters holding signs that cleverly exposed the hype-generating ruses they employed.
Continue Reading

Zine Publisher: “Debt is America’s social safety net”

By |

It’s a weird kind of fortune that greets Tobin Brogunier’s new publication, Creditland. A free tabloid distributed in the Twin Cities and Brooklyn, N.Y., its launch coincides with a spike in awareness of credit debt brought on by a meltdown in the subprime lending market and the premiere of the award-winning documentary film Maxed Out by James Scurlock (showing, until recently, at the Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis). But the publication’s origins have little to do with such luck.
Continue Reading

Fundamentalism on the covers

By |

In the April 2 issue of Time, Americans get treated to a different cover story than the rest of the world. The global editions report on the situation in Pakistan just across the Afghanistan border: “young religious extremists have overrun scores of towns and villages in the border areas, with the intention of imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on a population unable to fight back.” Such jihadists, writes Time, are providing cover for al-Qaeda leaders who are training new recruits, and Osama bin Laden is thought to have hidden in these tribal lands, dubbed Talibanistan.
Continue Reading