Cursor.org RIP?

October 10, 2008 4:41 PM

As of today, the truly excellent media filter & news digest Cursor.org is suspending publication.

For almost a decade, the Cursor crew have done a truly admirable job of providing an antidote to the corporate media. Through a daily round-up of news stories & commentary, they helped to provide critical context to the flurry of media stories that deluges us every day. Unfortunately, they lost their main source of funding in 2007. They've been trying to make a go of it through reader contributions but this has apparently not proved to be sustainable.

They are also behind the excellent Media Transparency, an organization that documents & explores the connections between conservative philanthropy & the media.

posted by jammy (8 comments total)

That's too bad. I've met the main guy behind cursor on a couple of occasions, he's a decent guy.
posted by gimonca at 4:54 PM on October 10, 2008

How come I always first find out about these things when they're closing up shop? Happened with Suck.com too.
posted by JHarris at 7:07 PM on October 10, 2008

*sob*

My homepage!

*rends garment, tears hair*
posted by mediareport at 7:28 PM on October 10, 2008 [1 favorite]

I've read cursor every day during lunch for YEARS. I am LOST.
posted by Jezebella at 8:55 PM on October 10, 2008

yeah, this really sucks. anyone know of any concerted effort or drive from their readership to help them? sounds like they need $75k a year to do it right. surely that can be raised? i kick myself for not throwing them a contribution before it was too late to do so.
posted by Hat Maui at 4:35 AM on October 11, 2008

anyone know of any concerted effort or drive from their readership to help them? sounds like they need $75k a year to do it right. surely that can be raised?

I wish I did - there isn't anything on the Cursor site that indicates something like this might be happening, and they have been soliciting contributions pretty regularly for the past year

what I can't figure out is why the Schumann Foundation pulled their funding? the only thing I can come up with is that they scored a one-time 5-year grant & it just came due last year - ever since they've been skating on the thin ice of reader donations

one possible pressure point would be to conduct a letter/email campaign at Bill Moyers directly (he's the president of the Schumann Foundation)

I, also, am feeling lost - there really isn't anything online that I know of that compares to their work
posted by jammy at 7:14 AM on October 11, 2008

Amen to that, jammy. Cursor was simple, elegant, and let the links do the opinionating for it. Compare it to a bloated shrill stupid mess like the Huffington Post homepage, or the idiotically ugly and needlessly annoying redesign that was Poynter's abuse of Romenesko's simple concept, and Cursor stands far above.

What a simple, sharp, smart resource. Off to writer Moyers/Schumann now; anyone who professes to love journalism shouldn't be yanking funding from such a perfectly elegant sifter of the day's news.
posted by mediareport at 4:34 PM on October 11, 2008

Cursor was far & above the best daily news digest from an antiwar perspective. There's still Antiwar.com, which is more comprehensive & also sorts by topic. But Cursor's brilliance was how it seamlessly strung related articles into a coherent narrative so you got the gist of the story without having to follow the links. It was written a lot like a good MetaFilter post, except every day it was AntiwarFilter.
posted by scalefree at 5:21 AM on October 13, 2008