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

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.

The first time I saw Tronnes, he was standing behind WCCO's Randi Kaye as she lead off the evening news with a "LIVE" report broadcast from the field where new governor Jesse Ventura had coached the Champlin Park High School football team... hours earlier. Questioning the newsworthiness of the story -- and its "live" coverage from a venue long emptied out of its newsmakers -- he held up a sign that read "Can't this wait until the sports news?"

There on the sign was the URL for Cursor, an online source for more criticism of the Twin Cities media scene. In the ten years since, Cursor has expanded its scope to include viewpoints on national media and both national and international politics. It now gets site visits in the five figures every day, and its Media Transparency project, spearheaded by Levine and launched in 1999, has compiled one of the more extensive maps of the conservative philanthropy movement, tracking 40 grantmaking groups on the political right and where their more than $3 billion in gifts are going.

On the site's tenth anniversary and with a fundraiser in progress, Tronnes agreed to discuss Cursor, his time as "The Crasher," and the evolving nature of the progressive blogosphere.

Paul Schmelzer: What are some of your favorite "media crasher" moments?

Mike Tronnes: When Cursor began in 1997, most of our invective was directed at local TV news. Even then it was hopelessly beyond reform, but it did provide endless opportunity for ridicule. We had a columnist named "Budd Rugg," who skewered the idea of local media celebrity, and whose schtick was that of a pathetic media sycophant. In 1999 I had a brief star turn as "The Crasher," walking onto live remotes of local TV newscasts while brandishing signs that both advertised Cursor and questioned what passes for reporting on TV news. I made my way onto a live remote from a Prince concert with a sign that read, "The program formerly known as The News."

Another trend that was ascendant at the time was synergizing news stories and network programming. It reached its peak -- or nadir, depending on your perspective -- in the summer of 2000 when WCCO-4 turned its newscasts into a promotional vehicle for the just-launched "Survivor." We documented this flagrant violation of the public trust in "Survivoring the News," and in a City Pages cover story that I worked on with Mike Mosedale, a founding member of Cursor, whose gonzo media criticism is archived in "The Moseum."

PS: When you started Cursor, the online media landscape was completely different. What are the changes you've seen in the realm of blogs and online media, and how is Cursor adapting to this new climate?

MT: Cursor.org began in 1997 as a local media criticism site. In 1999 we started a national version of our "Media Patrol" digest, adding politics to the mix, and after 9/11, expanded it to include international affairs. At that time the blogosphere was dominated by right-wing voices and many now-popular progressive news aggregators didn't exist. Nor did Google News, which is invaluable for seeing where a story's at, and what kind of play it is or isn't getting. Also, there were no sites like Media Matters or Think Progress that provided rapid response to conservative misinformation and the mainstream media's parroting of it.

This proliferation of sources certainly allows us to cover more ground, but it also makes our aggregating function trickier, because a lot of our readers also frequent those sites. And while we're always on the lookout for articles and issues that haven't made their way around the progressive aggregators and blogosphere, much of our effort is spent contextualizing those that have. Now it's less about discovering a story, and more about organizing and advancing it.

PS: Your site Media Transparency, maintained by Rob Levine, was one of the first resource portals to look into the funding of the political and religious right...

MT: Right. When Media Transparency launched in 1999, most people had only heard the term "vast right-wing conspiracy," without knowing much about it or how it functioned. But as conservatives expanded their influence in government -- see The Conservative Movement Moves In -- Media Transparency's research and editorial became invaluable for reporting on the impact that conservative philanthropy has on public policy. We currently track 40 conservative funders in a database that includes 8,000 recipients of 50,000 grants totaling more than $3 billion.

And while Cursor mainly draws from other editorial sources, Media Transparency is a content provider for anyone investigating conservative causes and organizations. Two good examples that I mentioned before are Media Matters and Think Progress. Cursor often links to them, and they in turn regularly link to Media Transparency's research.

PS: With Cursor and Media Transparency, your role is less visible: fundraising, hiring writers, marketing. An new article in The Nation talks about the funding of bloggers, how many news bloggers are volunteers, and how "progressives tend not to put their money where their mouth is." Cursor is a nonprofit that relies on grants and individual donations to survive -- and you're doing a fundraising appeal now. When you pitch potential funders, what's your best argument for the continued (and generous!) support of Cursor/Media Transparency?

MT: Cursor and Media Transparency are incorporated as Cursor, Inc., which is a 501(c)(3), the IRS's designation for non-profits. The majority of our funding comes from foundations, and our general argument to them is that we've successfully developed two Web sites and are an integral part of building what is often referred to as "progressive media infrastructure." We've put together an online fundraising site built around this theme, which includes an archive of articles and editorials about funding progressive infrastructure, called "Work In Progress."

Since most left-of-center foundations don't give grants for general operating support, unlike their counterparts on the right, our proposals have centered on specific projects relating to Media Transparency. The pitch being that with additional funding, we can promote Media Transparency's research to a more mainstream media audience. The goal is to get reporters and producers that cover subjects like school vouchers, Social Security privatization, or faith-based initiatives, to follow the money trail and paint a more complete picture of who's behind the various policy proposals, which are often inaccurately portrayed in the media as being grass roots in nature. The great irony is that while Media Transparency tracks more than $3 billion in conservative funding, we're scrambling to get a piece of the much-smaller pie that's available to progressive organizations.

Utne Re-Reader: A "progressive brand" reclaims its roots--and name

Given how media shakeups have been racking up headlines of late--from the sales of both metro dailies to editorial oustings at City Pages and The Rake--it's no surprise that progressive stalwart Utne has kept a low profile about change of its own. With its November/December 2006 issue, the magazine quietly rolled out a new tagline and a new--or, rather, old--name. Its cover once again bears the title it did when it was founded 23 years ago, Utne Reader. And "Understanding the next evolution" has been replaced with the simpler, "Thinking ahead."

Editor in chief David Schimke says the decision has a lot to do with another big change, last spring's sale of the magazine to Ogden Publications, the Kansas-based company that prints Grit, Steam Traction, and Mother Earth News, among others. With so many other upheavals, including two new editors in two years and a complete redesign of the publication last year, he says he didn't want to confuse readers or suggest that the sale had altered the essence of the magazine.

In fact, the change signals a return to the very heart of where Utne Reader began.

While Utne Reader remains "one of the top recognized progressive brands," according to Schimke, the standalone Utne never caught on.

The revised masthead signals a shift away from Utne's lifestyle focus of recent years. When Eric Utne retired from the magazine and his wife Nina took over, she concluded that in an internet age, the function of culling the best of alternative media might not be as relevant, so she dropped Reader. But Schimke and the new owners had a different idea. "Because of the internet, there’s even more need to cull, digest and filter," Schimke says. "And it seems like nobody in print is applying journalistic standards to the stuff that's turning up." The full title references the magazine's informal motto from years back: "The Reader's Digest of the alternative press."

Refocused, the magazine will also tackle political issues more directly and reduce the personal growth emphasis of recent years. Schimke says the old theme of "good news for bad times," used in Utne's publicity materials, will take on a "news that matters" feel, focused on giving exposure to under-represented ideas and news.

"We don't want to be just another progressive magazine," he says. "We want to use the alternative press to create an engaging conversation. We don't want to be didactic. We want to draw from libertarian sources, from liberal sources, from conservative sources.”

He adds that of the two places readers usually find Utne on a newsstand--beside Yoga Journal or next to Harper's--he'd prefer ending up beside the famed political magazine.

Utne Reader has seen its share of financial ups and downs, but these days its story seems a bit more like that discarded publicity slogan: its stability after the Ogden sale is a case of "good news for bad times." Bucking industry trends, Utne's subscriptions are holding steady at 225,000 and newsstand sales have increased slightly to 40,000 copies per issue.

"Given all possible scenarios, we couldn't have hoped for a better situation," he says of the Ogden sale. "They believe in the magazine, and if anything, they want us to be more aggressive and more topical. Of all the media upheaval in the last year, locally, I think we fared the best. I don’t want to gloat about it. In fact, I'm humbled by it. But the owners are smart. They get the magazine. And they're willing to give us the time to establish ourselves again."

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Insider outsider: An interview with Mark Ritchie

Experienced at working with international institutions and grassroots activists alike, Mark Ritchie has been known to use an “insider-outsider strategy.” It's an apt descriptor: A onetime chicken farmer and co-op organizer, he’s addressed the UN General Assembly on commodities and sustainable development. A speaker at the first-ever World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and organizer of a boycott of Nestle (for their campaign urging mothers in developing countries to switch from breast milk to formula), he’s worked closely with corporations like Cargill in developing sustainable practices. For 20 years, he’s lead the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a non-profit he founded that researches global trade's effects on local family farmers, and in 2004, he spearheaded the nation’s largest voter registration drive, in which five million new voters registered through a project marked by blue t-shirts emblazoned only with the text: “November 2.”

On November 7, Ritchie hopes to unseat Minnesota's incumbent Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer. With just days before the election, I caught up with him to discuss not just the race, but the ideas that shape his politics that are unabashedly progressive, deeply humane, and solidly pragmatic.

We’ve discussed the zero-waste campaign events you’ve hosted, IATP’s work writing standards for the production of biodegradable, plant-based polymers for industrial use, and your work on the global trade issues that affect family farmers. How will you bring your knowledge of sustainability and environmental practices into the office of Secretary of State?

I’m going to be very busy as Secretary of State dealing with certain messes and finding out the problems. But there are three things I believe I can contribute. One is sitting on the board of investment policymaking for the pension funds. $50 billion: it’s pension money. It should have a 50-year perspective, because that’s about how long most folks are working these days. And to have a 50-year perspective is to have an ecological and a sustainable perspective long term.

Second, the Secretary of State’s office spends money, so you can set standards. We have standards now for buying from veteran-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, minority-owned businesses. We have standards for mercury reduction. Having a standard that looks at bio-based, Minnesota-based, renewable sources is not that complicated anymore and certainly could be done.

And finally, people are interested in vision. What’s your vision of the democracy? What’s your vision of the country? What’s your vision of the future? As Secretary of State you get the opportunity to speak to audiences—sometimes it’s one reporter and sometimes it’s a thousand students gathered for a conference—so being able to articulate a vision that’s holistic, so that the democracy fits into respect for rights and responsibilities which then extends to the communities around us.

Who are some of the thinkers, in Minnesota or elsewhere, who’ve inspired you?

David Morris from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. In the ‘30s, Henry Ford and others spearheaded the Chemurgy Movement, which was a movement to get off of petroleum and base our industrial economy on plant matter, on things that would grow. They were essentially defeated by cheap oil. The US invaded north Africa. We seized control of the oil fields—the British did with the US—guaranteeing cheap petroleum, and it basically killed off the chemurgy movement.

But David Morris began talking about the carbohydrate economy, and he began educating all of us about how we could do all these things with plant matter and how that would affect Minnesota’s economy, and how we could stop importing oil and stop killing ourselves with these poisonous petroleum-based products and destroying the ozone and destroying the climate. David Morris single-handedly rebirthed that movement.

Will Steger, as an explorer, basically set out to go places and do things that nobody’s ever done, and in the course of doing that he became intimate with the details of how human-generated changes in the climate have begun to alter everything from the tiniest plants to the glacial ice shelf of Greenland and Antarctica. He was able to bring a vision by being able to talk about it from the personal in a way that no one has ever done, at least in my experiences no one’s done it quite like that.

There’s a lot in our history. The artist [Francis Lee] Jaques was able to capture some of this in painting and in art. Ann Bancroft is also somebody who, through her own experience is able to articulate another way to see the world and be able to communicate that—especially to young people. Minnesota’s loaded!

In your work with IATP, you’ve befriended everyone from CEOs to small-scale organic farmers. How will that experience come into play in the Secretary of State’s office?

I feel fortunate that I’m old enough to have learned a lot of things over time, like how to be respectful of other views and how to draw on the experience of others and make the emphasis on finding win-win solutions and getting things done. I feel fortunate to be old enough to have gotten to that stage. Especially with elections. Because township officials, city clerks, and county auditors: those are the people who actually run elections. They’re a mix of every political stripe you’ve got. So, if you’re able to include and involve all those election officials, then you’re going to have a richness that transcends a single partisan perspective or any perspective in that way.

Elections are the most prominent part of the Secretary’s job. What about the other aspects? There are business filings, you’re the keeper of the state song or whatever…

(Laughs.) The two other big things: the Secretary of State sits on the pension board. This has been pretty secretive until the big flap over Mary Kiffmeyer’s support of William McGuire and the whole United Health board debacle. Mike Hatch and Pat Anderson voted to remove the board of United that had all these corrupt executives and Pawlenty recused himself, because he takes a lot of campaign contributions from these corrupt executive. Mary Kiffmeyer voted in favor of the corrupt executives. That whole process needs to be transparent. The second is that the conflicts of interest need to be put out there. I mean, Mary Kiffmeyer is a major owner of a very large bank, so there’s all kinds of potential conflict of interest, because banks have customers and pension funds are making investments. There’s a lot to that pension fund that hasn’t been talked about much.

That’s one job. The second one is two-thirds of the staff, and it’s business filings. One of the reasons I’ve gotten such strong, positive support from the county recorders—the folks who handle business filing at the county level—is that they’re constantly frustrated by the failures in the office when the computers go down or all the services are unavailable and it makes them look like fools back home.

One thing I hadn't noticed was how angry the commercial business-related lawyers were until I started getting invited to give presentations at all these fancy downtown law firms. When I got to my first one, a guy said to me, “You know, we were all furious when Mary Kiffmeyer decided to just close the business filings part of her office” in kind of a snit with Jesse Ventura. Ventura said all agencies should save money by reducing costs by a certain percent, and she said, essentially, the heck with you, and shut the office down. Many lawyers said, "Wait, you can’t do that. We’ve got clients who want to file as corporations, they want us to do name changes." Some of them switched to doing it in Wisconsin and Delaware. They were furious.

Last week I was doing one of these presentation at a 40th floor of a big downtown law firm, and the guy repeated a story: earlier in the week he was talking to a lawyer in Boston, representing a Boston-based investor in a Minnesota company, and they were arguing that they should reincorporate the company in Delaware not in Minnesota. One of his arguments was: “The Secretary of State is always shutting down the office there. How can you ever deal with them?” Minnesota law firms—big ones—compete with coastal-based law firms in New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles. And the perception is the typical stereotype: we’re flyover land, we’re hicks, things don’t really work, we’re really second tier. When the Secretary of State does something like shut down the office and make everybody look like a fool, it reinforces that perception that we’re just not up to snuff here and it’s damaging to their ability to compete at a national level for legal business. I know that Business Services side doesn’t get much attention, it does take up a lot of staff, but if you don’t operate it properly, you can create a very bad situation for Minnesota businesses…

I’ve spent 20-some months meeting with all the people who interact with that office on a daily or weekly basis, and I’ve gotten an earful from auditors and recorders and everybody. I have a long list of the problems, but I also have a long list of very helpful specific suggestions on ways to fix the problems, improvements that could be made, and really creative—some of them genius—ideas for things we could do going forward. I’m very excited to get in there and roll my sleeves up and reinspire that staff and say, hey, we’re going to turn this around.

I find it interesting that you haven’t played up your huge voter registration experience more in your campaign. You’re the guy behind that, but I suspect more people have seen those November 2 t-shirts than have heard of you.

Yeah, I know. While I’m extremely proud of it and I mentioned it in the ad and I love saying it in speeches, I want to make sure that I’m always clear that this was a huge effort and that I had the privilege of being the leader and coming up with and moving it. But there was a couple thousand groups—400 in Minnesota. Registering five million people is this Herculean task, and one person can have a big role, but one person can’t be that campaign.

I haven’t seen much campaigning by Mary Kiffmeyer in the metro area; is she giving up on the Twin Cities or my demographic?

There’s a lot of billboards and radio, and there are some full-page ads in things like the Senior Federation paper. She has very high name recognition, and I have very low name recognition, so probably she’s pitching her base. Her ads feature Dick Franson speaking, with her coming in on the end saying “I approve this ad.” So her ads are a little unusual in that way.

Isn’t that a bit like what you did on your TV spots with Joan Growe?

Well. Joan Growe was the most beloved and 24-years-serving Secretary of State. Dick Franson is a 22-time failed candidate, in and out of bankruptcy, writes me racist notes and threatening little postcards. He’s like the opposite. So, anyhow. That’s her decision—whatever—but one of the four candidates, Bruce Kennedy, really went after her publicly in the debate in Duluth about this… He called it exploitation. It was a very strong statement, and he really meant it.

In preparing for this interview, I was looking for your critics. The only criticism I’ve heard is that you’re not running for higher office.

(Laughs) Yeah. I feel like there’s a bit of disrespect for the office of Secretary of State, and I’ve noticed it inside the political parties, the media, and the public, and even among my friends. I think the mechanics and the guardianship of democracy and the voting process in the past was well done, so people didn’t worry about it. So the job didn’t seem so important. And then Florida woke us up—and Ohio and Mary Kiffmeyer set off a big alarm—but I’ve found for myself, traveling the state and talking about the democracy every night, that I don’t believe there’s a more important job than being a champion of the democracy at this stage in the nation’s history. It’s not just the question of the elections, but the whole assault on the democracy: attacks on judges and gerrymandering and ripping up the constitution. To my friends who said, “Why are you wasting your time,” I’ve gotten so I answer them with some pretty strong words. Defending the democracy is the most important thing I can be doing, and that’s what I should be doing, and I’m going to do a really good job of it.