Pushing the envelope

Correspondence captures 25 years of life at the intersection of Isthmus and Madison

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If I had to pick a favorite, it might be my response in the year 2000 to a letter from a reader criticizing something I had written in Isthmus. I asked, “Did you intend your letter to the editor to have a point? If so, you neglected to include it. Just an oversight on your part, I’m sure.”

Or maybe it would be the advice I gave in 1996 to a county board supervisor who was taken aback that the paper had portrayed him negatively, despite his being such a very good liberal. “It may be useful for you to think of Isthmus as a dog,” I wrote him back. “Sometimes it’s friendly and cuddly; maybe it will even let you pat it on the head. Just remember, though: The dog bites.”

Or maybe it’s the time I told a guy named McGrew to “McGrow up.” That was hilarious.

But perhaps this is the wrong way to go about looking at this. The 25 years of correspondence that I recently donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society from my tenure as news editor of Isthmus is remarkable more in its totality than its individual parts. The thousands of pages of printed materials that I delivered to the society in March have been processed as part of the society’s archives and now fill four document boxes.

Throughout my quarter century at Isthmus, from 1986 to 2011, I kept a folder in my left-hand desk drawer labeled “correspondence,” into which I would put letters and later copies of emails sent and received, along with other materials I considered worth saving. Each year, I would start a new file.

Rarely did I look at what was stashed in these folders. Most stayed put until early 2020, when I began sorting through them to create a 118-page searchable index before I delivered them to the Historical Society, which had expressed interest in these materials.

In reviewing these files, I was astonished by what I found — most of which I had forgotten. There are letters of recommendation for interns who went on to win Pulitzer prizes. There is back and forth with writers about how to approach stories. There are planning memos for staff reporting projects. There are epic arguments with readers and subjects of stories. There are letters that I regret having sent, and some that I was sorry to receive.

These files also reflect the advance of technology as it transformed the profession. As the years wore on, the volume of letter correspondence waned, as communications once conducted by mail took place via email.

This quarter-century of correspondence also harks back to a very different media landscape, when the city had two staff-packed dailies and two campus dailies to boot. It offers dramatic testimony to the paper’s brashness and relevance, which endure to this day.

And, as Isthmus continues to battle its way back from the brink caused by COVID-19, it provides a window, however narrow, to assess the history and legacy of this paper, which for many Madisonians, is part of the fabric of the city.

‘Bringing stories into land’

The first item in the first “Correspondence” folder that I began in March 1986 is a copy of my job description. The first sentence: “The news editor is in charge of making sure that news-minded people find the paper worth reading,” wording that surely came from publisher Vince O’Hern.

The second item in the folder is a typewritten memo from my predecessor, Marc Eisen, who left Isthmus after 10 years to take a job at The Capital Times. (He would later return to Isthmus after seeing how the other side lived, as have a considerable number of Isthmus expatriates, from Dean Robbins to Judith Davidoff to Jason Joyce). In 12 typewritten pages, he explained what the job entailed. “In general,” he wrote, “the [news] editor needs to serve like an airline flight controller bringing stories in to land.”

It was an apt description. Lining up and editing a cover story, news section and opinion pieces each week as well as churning out my own writing meant having a lot of planes in the air. And this was all in an era of relatively primitive technology.

When I started at Isthmus, I brought in the office’s only computer, an Apple IIc. All other copy was pounded out on typewriters and edited by hand, with an occasional rewritten paragraph typed up and taped to the page; then every word in the issue was re-keystroked by our resident typesetter, Marcy Weiland.

Back then, locating an article that had appeared in the local dailies even a few months earlier — a task now accomplished in a five-second Google search — meant heading to the library, reviewing an index and threading microfilm through a viewer to get printed copies, for 10 cents per page. I made that journey many a time.

The correspondence from my early years at Isthmus consists largely of pitches from writers and discussions about works in progress. I would respond with advice and suggestions.

In an August 1987 letter to former Wisconsin Gov. Tony Earl, I critiqued a lengthy essay he had submitted to Isthmus about his tenure as governor, which the previous fall election had ended. “For me the piece never really takes off until Page 6,” I informed him, adding that “The essay as a whole needs a bit more passion.” Isthmus ran a revised version of the article as a cover story in November, titled “Good Government vs. Good Politics.”

“I want a tough, hard-hitting analysis. Articles like this are relevant in direct proportion to how provocative they are,” I wrote in February 1990 to Ed Garvey, an unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate writing a critique of the state Democratic Party. “I think we should identify ways in which the Dems, up to and including [gubernatorial contender] Tom Loftus, have behaved gutlessly — cozying up to corporations, avoiding controversial issues, icing out progressives. … I think we should feel free to predict Loftus’ defeat. [He lost.] I think we should bloody the noses of a few of these technocrats. Does this sound like an audacious enough task?”

Garvey’s story, which met this challenge, ran in June 1990, under the headline “What’s Wrong with the Democrats?”

There are a few letters to and from famous people, including Michael Moore, Alexander Cockburn, Dave Barry, Jon Meacham, Charlie Sykes (then an Isthmus contributor), Nat Hentoff, Donna Shalala, Garry Trudeau, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Farley Mowat. Most are to and from regular Isthmus writers, readers, story sources and subjects.

In an April 1989 letter to Shalala, then UW-Madison chancellor, I objected to how a request for comment from her office was handled. I noted that when we had lunch in February 1989, shortly after she started the job, she invited me to contact her if I ever needed to. Yet now, when I attempted to do so, I was “treated like a pest.” She did not respond.

There are letters of recommendation that I wrote for colleagues and former interns whose names you might recognize. They include Morry Gash, W.P. Norton, David Tenenbaum, Mark Pitsch, Steve Irvin, David Michael Miller, Sally Franson, Robert Gebeloff, Anthony Shadid and Abigail Goldman. The last two went on to win Pulitzer prizes, as did a third intern, Richard Winton, who now writes for The Los Angeles Times.

“I do not think that I have ever seen a more promising 21-year-old journalist,” I wrote in my recommendation for Shadid. “He is an excellent interviewer and a keen interpreter of [stories]. He knows how to obtain and utilize documents. He is extremely scrupulous in checking facts.” Anthony spent his post-Isthmus career with the Associated Press, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He won two Pulitzers and wrote two acclaimed books, Night Draws Near about Iraq and House of Stone about rebuilding his family’s ancestral home in Lebanon.

Anthony died of an asthma attack in Syria in 2012, while working for the Times. He was 43.

The clashes

Some of the most contentious correspondence in the files involve the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times, which I reported on with some tenacity. (Doug Moe once opined in Madison Magazine that I was all over this beat “like stink on a goat.” It’s in the folders.) The dailies didn’t like it.

In 1988, I wrote that legendary Cap Times reporter John Patrick Hunter had borrowed some quotes from an article by State Journal writer Joe Beck — a minor journalistic transgression that I refused to overlook. Dave Zweifel, the Cap Times editor, came at me with both barrels blazing:

“[N]either you nor Joe Beck have the journalistic skills to make a pimple on John Hunter’s ass.” I replied: “My little story last week was solid and legitimate, as you would no doubt agree if it were written” about Isthmus by the Cap Times’ media columnist. (I now regard Zweifel and the Cap Times as two of the most venerable institutions in town.)

I reported in-depth on the two papers’ nationally unique ownership agreement, using records I unearthed at the Wisconsin Historical Society. They revealed that the papers are actually both owned by Madison Newspapers Inc., a third entity they created in 1948. The Cap Times, especially, did not want to admit this, insisting that the papers’ editorial functions were completely separate. In fact, they are joined at the hip, as has become clearer over time, now that the print edition of the Cap Times is an insert in the State Journal.

In June 1989, State Journal publisher Jim Burgess put out a memo to the entire crew at Madison Newspapers Inc. saying my reporting on the paper’s profitability, which I had extrapolated from public disclosures, was “completely false” but not saying what I got wrong. The paper even ran an article on this without clearing it up, which editor Frank Denton defended in a letter to me: “We allowed him to deny your figures, and when our reporter asked for his own earnings estimate, he declined to give one — and our story said that.”

Some of the other clashes in my correspondence files are with writers and story sources.

In a 1990 exchange, Bruce Murphy, a former Isthmus staffer who had encouraged me to apply for my job, took bitter exception to how I had edited his copy. I defended what I had done, saying “You are one of the best writers I’ve ever edited, but do think my editing has made your articles stronger.” He acknowledged that my edits made his writing simpler, but defended his right to keep it more complex; my editing, he chided, seemed to assume “the average Isthmus reader moves his lips when he reads.” We worked it out.

The folder for 1996 commemorates a clash I had with an assistant attorney general in which we both ended up complaining to each other’s bosses. My letter to her boss, then-Attorney General Jim Doyle, was handled dismissively. So was her call to Isthmus editor Eisen at home.

That was a good thing about the paper. Vince and Marc weren’t perfect, but they did have your back. In 1992, Marc wrote me a handwritten memo regarding his “45-minute phone call” from then-Mayor Paul Soglin. Marc’s entire summary of the conversation: “He’s unhappy with your column.”

Miscellany

In addition to actual correspondence, there are various items I tossed into a file called “Miscellaneous,” which is also part of the collection.

These include a clipping of a 1988 review of a dinosaur exhibit at the Madison Children’s Museum that my son,

Jesse, then three-and-a-half, wrote on assignment for Isthmus. Here’s his lead: “I was scared at first, and then I hided behind Dad. ‘Cept then I wasn’t scared. Because the dinosaurs were just machines!”

I also saved the submission I received in 1988 from a journalism student that included what may be the worst lead of all time: “One drink now and then one for later may seem harmless. But for an alcoholic and his or her family, life may just drag on without seeking outside help.”

The collection contains a separate file of articles and correspondence from the Wisconsin Capitol uprising of 2011, which came at the end of my Isthmus career. This includes a thick printout of the more than 43,000 words of copy that I wrote for the paper and its website over a six-week period of this intense time. My last day at Isthmus, captured by filmmaker Phil Busse (“Isthmus rough cut”), was in June 2011. I went on to the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and ultimately to my current role as editor of The Progressive.

What distinguishes Isthmus, I realized as I read through the folders, was the license that it gave me and others to push the envelope, defy convention and ruffle feathers. That involved a lot of clashing, but it also earned respect.

Beyond that, the paper has long provided a training ground for budding journalists, where they learn about storytelling, feature writing and investigative reporting, and get expert editing help. It has let writers have a voice and be arbiters of facts versus falsehoods, even before Donald J. Trump forced that on reporters everywhere.

There’s one more exchange I’ll share with you. In 2004, I sent an email apologizing to a source who had tipped me off that a Madison high school football coach gave love dolls to his assistant coaches in front of dozens of witnesses. I had doubted his account — “Nobody has judgment that bad, do they?” — but it turned out to be true.

“Hey, no apology needed,” he replied. “Skepticism is part of your job description. … I wish your Washington counterparts were as tough and thorough as you, instead of serving as stenographers for administration sources.”

I told him that this was one of the nicest compliments I had ever gotten, and that I was “making a print-out and putting it in a folder” for future reference. And that’s exactly what I did. 

Dear Pat Simms

Among the correspondence in the folder for 1991 is a poem letter that I wrote to the Wisconsin State Journal’s Pat Simms, who then penned a column called “Snoop.” It was a response to an article about Simms in Madison Magazine in which she says she was warned by an anonymous adviser to not “fall into Lueders’ turf” by being too harsh. Simms died in April at age 75.

Are you in the files?

The files of correspondence that I donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society from my tenure as news editor of Isthmus, 1986 to 2011, are available to all for viewing. Just stop by the archives reading room, located in the Wisconsin Historical Society headquarters building on the UW-Madison campus, during regular hours. You do have to register. The staff is very helpful.

While most of the materials have not been scanned or digitized, there is an index of the correspondence for each year included with the folders.

A far easier way to search for material, though, is to use the electronic version of this Index and search for names or terms. You can then much more easily find the correspondence in the chronologically arranged files.