A doubly good time to support Tone Madison

Your donations will be matched during our year-end campaign.

Tone Madison turned nine years old this fall. We stand a good chance of getting this thing to its 10th anniversary. 

You may or may not know that Tone Madison depends heavily on direct donations from our readers. Tone Madison Sustainers make a monthly, automatically recurring donation (it’s easy to set up!). Other folks might chip in with the occasional one-time donation. It adds up, and that’s how we’re able to publish our independent, against-the-grain coverage of culture and politics in Madison. Are you thinking of stepping up an existing donation? Or on the fence about giving for the first time? Well, this is the absolute best time of year to take the plunge.  

From Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, your new donations will be tripled by the national NewsMatch program, the Loud Hound Foundation, and community matches. With  your help, Tone Madison can unlock a whopping $43,000 in total.  

One-time donations count. New recurring monthly donations also count, for the full-year amount. So if you become a Tone Madison Sustainer at $15/month, that right there is $180 our funders will triple. This is the time of year when your contribution has the biggest impact, and no amount is too small or big to make a difference.

Oh, and if you donate today, Nov. 1, you’ll be able to get discount tickets for a show we’re presenting tonight: The Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra at Garver Feed Mill. We really want to be able to share this experience with you, so please come on out. You can also join us at the last Tone Madison Office Hours of the year, on December 8 at Giant Jones Brewing Company.

We also have a committed group of Madisonians pledging larger amounts for an additional local match fund, $2,000 and counting, that will help your donation go even further. (If you have the means to join them, with a donation of $500 or more, please reach me directly.) So just know that right now, on day one of this fundraiser, other Tone Madison readers are already putting serious skin in the game. Your donation will be in good company.

Every week our tiny publication survives, we defy a devastating economic climate for local news outlets. The fact that we’ve made it nine years is a testament to the power of reader support. It also demonstrates just how hard our staff and freelance journalists work to make sure that support does as much good as possible. We still wrestle with tough budget decisions all the time, but we’ve got our priorities right. The vast majority of our budget goes toward paying people to report, write, and edit the stories you read on Tone Madison. We’re not kicking up to a corporate parent company or making a profit for investors. We’re truly independent, reader-supported, and worker-owned.

No other media outlet is going to cover Madison like we do, and no one is going to make it last unless you do. When we say we’re reader-supported, we mean that the money you give us literally makes it possible to do our work and pay our bills. That effect is immediate and tangible, whether you’re giving $5/month or digging a little deeper. You’d be damned impressed at how far we can stretch a dollar, if I may say so, but we owe you no less.

We take your support seriously. Right now you’ve got a chance to make a serious impact. Please chip in what you can. We’ll use it to close out this first decade, in a way that we can all be proud of.

Thank you for being our lifeline.

—Scott Gordon, publisher