Original edit team - Isthmus Community Media, Inc.
Oh what a year (and then some)! Co-workers, from left, Bob Koch, Judith Davidoff, Dylan Brogan and Linda Falkenstein kept content going while building a new organization.
Could I have come up with a wonkier name than “Nonprofit news creation — daily calendar”?
It’s the Google doc I started when we knew for certain that Isthmus would be ending its 45-year run as a privately owned newspaper. We had little time to explore options, but determined that converting to a nonprofit model would reinforce our goal of public service and allow us to draw on financial support from readers, foundations and the greater Madison business community. How we would build this organization — in the middle of a pandemic, no less — was a mystery at the time.
My first log entry is dated July 6, 2020. The notes are minimal:
“Met with Eve, discussed steps/fundraising/people to call.”
“Met with Dylan, discussed our mutual interest in the endeavor, short- and long-term strategies.”
Eve Galanter, a former city council member and longtime civic leader, first floated the idea of Isthmus creating a 501(c)(3) as a way to supplement the reader donation program former owners Jeff Haupt and Craig Bartlett put in place in April 2020. In what would be the first of many coaching/pep talk sessions, Eve and I sat socially distanced on my front porch on July 6 as I tried to get a grasp on what it takes to get a nonprofit off the ground.
Dylan Brogan, of course, is Isthmus’ award-winning reporter. The question on the table when we met: “Are we in? Are we going to give this a go?”
Jeff and Craig, who bought Isthmus in 2014, paused print production in March 2020 when much of the paper’s advertising revenue dried up due to COVID-19 shutdowns; all 23 staffers were laid off within the week. Some former staff and freelancers kept writing for the website for free and a few people were hired back in April with Paycheck Protection Program funds. A couple of months later Jeff and Craig reluctantly determined that it was not financially feasible for them to continue owning Isthmus. But they generously offered to donate the paper’s intellectual property if we were to forge ahead as a nonprofit.
On July 7, according to my log, Dylan and I met with arts editor Catherine Capellaro, features editor Linda Falkenstein, and calendar editor Bob Koch; all were supportive of moving forward even with the knowledge that there would be no payroll support for who knows how long. The same day Chad Hopper, Isthmus’ longtime sales manager, confirmed that he was game to continue fielding advertising requests.
I also talked to Steve Goldberg, a fundraising consultant, who offered to facilitate a visioning session on the future of Isthmus. Our crew met July 16, agreeing in general that we wanted to continue Isthmus’ tradition of broad coverage, reporting on local government, politics, music, food, and the arts.
And we were united on one key point: We all wanted to find our way back to print.
Isthmus was co-founded in 1976 by Vince O’Hern and Fred Milverstedt, who left the business after a few years. Vince owned the paper until 2014 when he sold it to Jeff and Craig. In a farewell tribute to Vince, former Isthmus editor Dean Robbins captured the spirit and legacy of Isthmus perfectly.
“At the outset, Vince conceived of Isthmus as different from a daily newspaper,” Robbins wrote. The paper “became a pioneer in the alternative newsweekly movement, which included the likes of the Village Voice and the Chicago Reader. The mission was to focus intensely on Madison, taking its measure from Capitol to co-op to cafe. The early issues featured unconventional topics, sharp-edged commentary, a comprehensive calendar of events, and ambitious arts-and-entertainment coverage — all in all, a new voice for Madison. Isthmus became a showcase for one-of-a-kind writers, who won armloads of state and national awards and, even better, the respect of many local readers.”
The first issue of Isthmus, founded as an alt-weekly in 1976 by Vince O'Hern, right.
The alt-weekly movement grew and so did Isthmus. That first issue in 1976 was eight pages; at its most robust in the early 2000s, it clocked in an 64 pages or so (without a special section inside) and had a print run of around 62,000. Those were the good old days. Before the internet siphoned off advertising from alts and other print media; before Facebook and Google found ways to use our content without compensation; before disinformation campaigns turned people off to journalism in general, no matter how high quality.
Between the end of 2004 — “when newspaper advertising, circulation and employment were at, or near, peak levels” – and the end of 2019, more than 2,000 newspapers went out of business in the United States, according to a 2020 report by Penelope Muse Abernathy, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During the same period, about half of the nation’s journalists “vanished.”
And that was before the coronavirus hit. Starting in April 2020, the journalism organization Poynter started keeping a tally of the newsroom layoffs, furloughs and closures due to COVID-19. Isthmus landed on that list, with hundreds of others:
“In March of 2020, Isthmus, a weekly in Madison, Wisconsin, announced it had to ‘go dark for an undetermined amount of time.’” It later added: “In November, it announced it applied for nonprofit status.”
We need to let them know our story does not end there. There is also a bit of a gap in that narrative.
Sprung from storage: Jason Joyce, left, and Dylan Brogan return Isthmus newspaper boxes to downtown in advance of the print relaunch.
With help from more than a dozen contributors who volunteered their services, we spent the late summer and early fall trying to keep as much content on our site as we could. Dylan stayed on the streets for hours reporting on the Black Lives Matter protests, later landing a Milwaukee Press Club gold for his coverage. We helped train a young UW journalist, Tamia Fowlkes, through a Google News Fellowship program and landed a grant to provide coverage of the 2020 presidential election.
Meanwhile, Linda, Bob, Dylan and I picked up tasks that had been covered by others in what we now call “The Before Times.” Linda started curating and publishing two of our newsletters and took the lead in finding us a new printer; Bob took over Isthmus Picks and began researching distribution options.
Dylan became our de facto social media manager, IT director and advertising assistant. I consulted with as many people as I could on how to put a nonprofit together and worked on a business plan (shout out to UW business prof Michael Williams and his students, and Michelle Somes-Booher, director of the Wisconsin Small Business Development Center, for their assistance) and case statement for fundraising prospects (thanks to former Isthmus creative director Ellen Meany for designing that!).
We opened a bank account and sought out people for our board of directors. Current members include Masood Akhtar, Michael Cummins, Sue Robinson, Ralph Russo, Molly Stentz, Dylan and me. In the past few months the board has approved policies on donor transparency and editorial independence.
Attorney Melissa Scholz, who specializes in nonprofit law, drew up our asset transfer agreement with the help of Lydie Hudson, an intellectual property attorney; in late October we filed our application for nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service. We received notice of our official 501(c)(3) status in April.
Michael Cummins, an Isthmus opinion columnist and business analyst, stepped up to become our volunteer bookkeeper extraordinaire, Barbara Bolan took over sales when Chad left for another job, and a small group of volunteers, including Jenny Pressman, Eve Galanter, Betty Harris Custer, Corkey Custer and Linda Baldwin, is now helping with fundraising.
Thom Jones, Isthmus’ former IT director who is now at WORT-FM, devoted countless volunteer hours transferring data from our old servers to our new cloud-based system.
During this whole time we were buoyed by the encouragement and financial support from our loyal readers. It’s what gave us the confidence to strike out on our own.
We also saw the trend line for nonprofit news. Membership in the trade group Institute for Nonprofit News has tripled since 2016; in 2020 alone, membership grew by 25 percent. The group now has more than 300 members, including Isthmus, which became a dues-paying member this summer.
In April, we knew it was now or never. We took the leap and committed to returning to print in August. Jason Joyce came on board as publisher July 1; Tommy Washbush agreed to design the inaugural issue. Both Isthmus alums helped get this first paper out the door.
Moving forward, we will continue to meet our audience where they are, whether that means delivering content through our website or in our newsletters, sent directly to readers’ inboxes. We will prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion in our voices and coverage and collaborate with other nonprofits and media organizations.
We will train young journalists through internships (thanks to UW-Madison journalism student Ellie Nowakowski for going with the flow and helping us out through the last few very busy months) and provide a space for enterprise and feature writing from freelancers who range from budding writers to veteran journalists.
And we will continue to help our community through the COVID-19 crisis with coverage on the challenges faced by individuals, artists and businesses, as well as their successes in adapting to changing circumstances.
There is evidence that when local news disappears and there are fewer eyes on the workings of government, there are real consequences. “Overall, our results indicate that local newspapers hold their governments accountable, keeping municipal borrowing costs low and ultimately saving local taxpayers money,” researchers from the Brookings Institution concluded.
Another study has shown that partisanship increases when newspapers close. “When people read news about their neighborhoods, schools and municipal services, they think like locals,” co-author Joshua Darr has written. “When they read about national political conflict, they think like partisans.”
We are trying to counter those trends. But covering the news and producing high-quality journalism does not come cheap. Our core editorial team worked for more than a year without a salary, but that was not sustainable and we established payroll in June.
To raise revenue we will continue to grow our reader membership club, launched in June, and aggressively seek out foundation funding. We will also continue spreading the word about how advertisers can now help support local news with sponsorships while also getting word out about their businesses and organizations.
This fall we will be participating in an important fundraiser through INN called NewsMatch, which doubles and sometimes triples each donation to a nonprofit newsroom. You’ll be hearing more about that from us soon.
It was impossible to thank each and every one of you who supported us through some pretty dark times, but I hope you know that your efforts are deeply appreciated. Onward!
