J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
David Medaris.
David Medaris started writing listings for Isthmus while still in high school.
When Isthmoids past and present recall 50 years of our accomplishments — journalism awards, needle-moving stories, letters to the editor both gleeful and furious — the part of the paper for which we are arguably best known rarely comes up. Perhaps that’s because it’s also the section that requires the most painstaking work.
I’m referring to the events calendar. It’s not hyperbole to say that Isthmus’ calendar, formerly known as The Guide, is the most comprehensive source for information about arts, entertainment, and community events in our part of the state. As Isthmus founder Vince O’Hern liked to say, the calendar is the backbone of the paper. We’ve also heard this from many readers over the years. One put it succinctly: “Isthmus tells us what to do.”
In the first half of Isthmus’ history, the calendar was the domain of David Medaris, who started writing the listings while he was still a student at West High School. His knowledge of all the whos, whats, wheres and whens of Madison culture was encyclopedic and it was a neat parlor trick to get him to recite nightclub phone numbers and addresses from memory. Up until about 25 years ago, the weekly Guide listings were compiled and edited in a Microsoft Word document by Medaris.
A 2001 redesign of our website — then located at thedailypage.com — included a database for events, and the evolution required a figurative data dump from Medaris’ brain into a series of MySQL tables on our web server. The process wasn’t smooth, but the result was a tool that allowed our online readers to search and interact with hundreds of events scheduled as far into the future as Madison promoters, organizers, activists and librarians could program. The calendar editor job soon moved to Karen Darcy, who helped build out a second generation of the database, held together over the years by IT manager Thom Jones.
We’ve made some adjustments in the last 25 years, particularly when we transitioned from that home-brewed content management system to our current tool, Metro Publisher, in 2015. And of course our calendar editor for the last several years has been Bob Koch, who famously knows more about the city than anyone else. His work informs the search engines and, increasingly, artificial intelligence tools.
I recently queried ChatGPT about what was happening in Madison that night. It returned a short list of events categorized under lame headings like “chill / local music vibes.” I asked a followup: “Where did you find these events?”
The answer came immediately: “Isthmus events calendar. This is the most comprehensive local listing.”
Calendar listings don’t fit into the format of a traditional reported news story, but assembling what Bob does every day, week and month requires a tremendous amount of reporting, fact-checking, word-smithing and editing.
Taken as a collection of festivals, 5K runs, protests, plays and benefits, not to mention concerts and rock shows, that thousands of readers scroll through each day before buying tickets and texting invitations to friends, the calendar tells the story of a vital place to live, a city that grows busier each year.
