Tone Madison’s 2023 Annual Report

Breaking down the finances, challenges, and triumphs of our ninth full year in operation.

Readers have supported Tone Madison with their direct donations since 2014, and so have a handful of businesses and non-profits in the community. That is why this publication has kept going. Simple as that. Pretty soon, it might be the only way that any journalism happens at all in this country, barring some massive change in the bleak economics of media.

We feel it’s important to account for how we spend our money. We strive to contribute something of real value to our community in Madison—fiercely independent, refreshing, informative, challenging coverage of local culture and politics. We also strive to be transparent, because at the end of the day, the trust of our readers is all we have.

This report breaks down Tone Madison‘s income and expenses from 2023. (In fact, it offers more detail about our finances than any of the annual reports we’ve published in previous years.) It takes a frank look at the accomplishments and setbacks of the year. And like every year in this feisty little publication’s history, this one was filled with change and growing pains. We officially became a worker-owned cooperative. We gained and lost an excellent fundraising manager. We started and ended the year with the same core staff of three part-time editors and a part-time publisher/editor-in-chief. We published an ambitious reporting project that represented a literal year of hard work, and it won a national journalism award. We struggled with our finances, but survived and kept paying our journalists. We made painful cutbacks in some areas of coverage, and reached new heights in others.

Well, let’s get into it. This will start with our staff editors calling out their highlights from 2023, then will move on to more details about our finances, our conversion to a worker-owned cooperative, our audience and reach, and the impact our work had over the course of the year.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and questions.

Thank you for reading, supporting, and making all this possible. If you’d like to help us do more and better work, please consider supporting us as an individual donor or a business sponsor.

—Scott Gordon, Publisher

Our highlights of 2023

Grant Phipps, Film Editor: In many ways, 2023 felt like a banner year for film coverage due to our staff and freelancers’ ever-expanding focus. And yet, for me especially, it was never more concentrated locally.

I personally tried to fulfill a promise that I had been chasing for a little while, and that was to really immerse myself in the locality of event happenings and filmmaking. That may have been foreshadowed on the first two days of the new year with a pair of event previews—one for a local sex-education documentary fundraiser at Crucible and another for a live multidisciplinary video-music collaboration at the MMSD Planetarium. That aspiration later took us to other places off the beaten path, in our coverage about recurring and special-event screenings at the Mary DuPont Wahlers Theatre, OutReach LGBTQ+ Community Center, and Madison Circus Space.

In the second half of the year, we had meaningful dialogue with local video artists (and editors) like Alex T. Jacobs, organizers Miles Kristan (of SOGO Film Festival) and Karen Faster (of 53704 Frame By Frame), as well as fastidious cinephile JoAnne Powers, host of WORT’s Fire Worship! and “Wages Of Cinema” biweekly film calendar.

But this isn’t to say we paid any less attention to more conventional venues in Madison. During two particular periods (in late January through mid-February and the entire month of July), we saw an incredible swell of interest in the premier downtown hub, UW Cinematheque. After Spotlight Cinema at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art was retired, incoming curator James Kreul rebranded it as “MMoCA Cinema” and returned in late January through early March, and then once more in October through November, with more documentary-focused and essential, experimental angles.

A proper recapitulation of 2023 would be incomplete without acknowledging the incredible work that went into our densest and most incisive Wisconsin Film Festival preview, once again, in March and April, with contributions from 11 different voices. (And we even started in February with a bit of breaking news.)

In 2024, we’re persevering with the quality of coverage we’ve all come to expect, perpetuating interest in and thoughtful conversation about the film medium beyond broader interest writing—to show that Tone Madison can be a resourceful regional home and stable presence in an otherwise tenuous state of national media.

Christina Lieffring, News and Politics Editor: We really hit the ground running with news and politics coverage in 2023. The biggest project was “Post-Roe family planning in Madison,” our six-part series based on readers’ responses to our survey on how Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health affected people’s plans for their families. This task would not have been possible without our friends at Madison Minutes, contributors Dayna Long, Holly Marley-Henschen, and Hayley Sperling, and of course the original artwork that tied it all together by Kay Reynolds. We were awarded “Collaboration of the Year” by Lion Publishers and I got to go to Durham, North Carolina, give a tipsy speech, and bring home a nice little plaque I have displayed in my “office” (a corner of my living room). 

As if that wasn’t enough, we significantly expanded our coverage of several topics, including labor, attacks on LGBTQ rights, environmental impacts of energy production, policing, UW-Madison, local media criticism, and, of course, lots of coverage and analysis of housing, and transit. We also published more comics from T.L. Luke on the arts economy and how much Dan Kelly sucks, and new contributor Rachel Litchman’s series on inaccessible bus stops. 

We did a lot and as a result, we also experienced some growing pains. In 2024, our goal is to balance our budget constraints with providing the kind of coverage and commentary our audience has come to expect. 

Steven Spoerl, Music Editor: Tone Madison effectively kicked off and ended its 2023 music coverage the same way: with our annual best-of-Madison-music series. Our year-end music coverage has remained a point of pride for the publication, as it continuously demonstrates the extent of our commitment to local music.

We had our most extensive range of year-end selections in the publication’s history in our 2022 edition—which ran in January 2023—and far outstripped that range for 2023 (published in January 2024), touching on over 100 deserving releases. We assembled the ’24 selections in a more collaborative nature than past years, implementing a home-brewed selection system that gave greater voice to our freelancers and the other editors who contributed to the series, heightening a sense of community.

Tone Madison published roughly 60 music stories in 2023, and that number goes up by about 10 if we allow the best-of (and yearly retrospective) coverage to be counted. A small handful of freelancers stepped up to the plate over 2023 in convincing fashion, with Holly Marley-Henschen’s profile on Screamin’ Cyn Cyn & The Pons and Amelia Zollner’s analysis of—and commentary on—the history of Nottingham Co-Op both registering as highlights.

Our other editors got involved as well, with Grant Phipps and Scott Gordon tackling an enticing blend of artist profiles, hard-hitting news stories, cogent analysis, and lighthearted irreverence throughout the year. We continued to hold major music industry players accountable and showed a continued willingness to be confrontational in the process, something that has been conspicuously absent—to my eyes, at least—from other local arts publishers. In terms of personal contributions, over half of the music journalism Tone Madison ran in 2023 carried my byline.

Whether it was profiling Cicada The Burrower, Def Sonic, or Cult Of Lip, I worked towards cultivating an understanding—and communicating the importance of—local musicians’ artistry. Understanding is frequently at the root of the coverage Tone Madison aspires towards, and the music section is no exception. It didn’t matter if I was untangling the complex contextual elements of why DIY venues remain a necessity, unpacking the head-spinning inconsistencies and uncertainties of the business-end of live music photography, or reflecting on the concerning state of cultural normalcy by way of a viral video’s response—every piece was given genuine thought, consideration, and close scrutiny.

The level of attention Tone Madison provides to music coverage is uncommon, both locally and nationally. It’s a big part of why I started writing here back in 2018 and it’s a value I have worked tirelessly to uphold. Occasionally, the effort gets recognized, as it did when we were awarded our second consecutive Madison Area Music Award for Local Music Publication/Blog of the Year.

And even though we’re less than halfway into 2024, it’s already looking like we might be in the midst of our best year yet. 

Scott Gordon, publisher: Under Christina’s leadership, we aggressively stepped up our politics coverage. Labor writer JT Cestkowski detailed the benefits gap between horses and humans at UW-Madison, and reported a two–part series on Wisconsin’s busted child-care industry. We partnered with Our Lives to co-publish Alice Herman’s report on the threats to Pride events around the state. As the debate around Madison’s housing crisis grew ever more unhinged, we called bullshit on exaggerated claims and offered context from an array of informed perspectives. And that’s before we get into the mammoth effort of our “Post-Roe family planning in Madison” series.

I’m proud that Steven and Grant continued to push into the odd but essential corners of local cultural life. My favorites included Grant’s profile of local cinephile/musician/radio host JoAnne Powers, Amelia Zollner’s dive into Nottingham Co-op’s history as a DIY venue, and Steven’s post-mortem on two underground music spaces.

Money

In 2023, here were our expenses:*

Staff Wages	$66,000.00
Freelancer Payments	$24,500.00
Indiegraf Revenue Share	$7,500.00
Finance Fees (Stripe, PayPal, OutVoice, Banking fees, etc.)	$4,500.00
Taxes	$7,500.00
Legal & Professional Services	$11,500.00
Subscriptions / Tech Stack	$3,500.00
Advertising and Marketing	$1,000
Insurance	$500
Other Expenses (Including Dues to Membership Organizations, Business Supplies, etc.)	$1,500
Travel	$2,000.00
Total Expenses	$130,000.00

And our revenues:*

Reader Donations	$39,000.00
Matching funds via NewsMatch	$36,000.00
Sponsorships	$30,500.00
LION Grants	$21,300.00
Events Ticket Sales	$1,000.00
Merch Sales	$400
Total Income	$128,200

*These numbers are approximations published for the informational and educational purposes of this public annual report, and do not align precisely to Tone Madison’s official P&L statements or tax filings.

We lost about $1,800 during the year. In each of the previous three years, we actually brought in slightly more money than we spent. Considering the challenges a small media outlet faces, it’s honestly a relief that we didn’t lose a great deal more money. Still, our goal is to end each year in the black.

Money out

We spend the vast majority of our budget on paying our staff and freelancers. This is in line with our values: We believe in paying people for their work, as decently as possible. We believe that the only way to strengthen local journalism is to focus as much money as possible on paying journalists to do the work. (Far too much of the money in media, including the non-profit media landscape, gets siphoned off by the middlemen or wasted on unnecessary expenses.) The more a publication spends on paying people to create quality journalism, the greater its value to readers. 

Our publisher and three section editors each work part-time and make the same hourly wage of $16 per hour. This is… not what we’d like to pay ourselves, but it’s enough that we can all afford to spend time focusing on Tone Madison. For part of the year, we also had a part-time fundraising manager, who earned that same wage as well. Our fundraising manager, Micaela Magel, did great work on our behalf, but moved on to a new full-time job after about six months. We wish her well, and during her time here she created some much-needed tools that will help us well into the future. We haven’t been able to re-hire for that position just yet, so we ended the year as a staff of four.

Our total staff wages for the year (before payroll taxes and other associated expenses) came out to about $66,000. This was divided among four different people for most of the year, five people for part of it. That represents about 4,100 staff hours. Our staff spent most of those hours writing, reporting, editing, and coordinating stories. Our editing process is particularly labor-intensive and time-consuming, but that’s how we like it. Editing is quality control. It’s a learning experience for our contributors, whether they’re new to journalism or have decades of work under their belts. It’s intention. It’s care. It’s about giving everyone’s work a chance to shine.

Like a lot of publications, we rely heavily on freelance writers and illustrators. We pay higher freelance rates than a lot of larger local and even national publications. Again, it’s the right thing to do, but we also feel we have to offer the best compensation we can if we want to develop good working relationships with our freelancers. We spent more than $24,000 paying freelancers in 2023. That money went right to people here in our community for their hard work on reporting, writing, and creating original editorial art. We use a platform called OutVoice to process and manage freelance payments, and that takes a small cut of our transactions. It also helps us keep our tax ducks in a row and ensures that freelancers get paid via direct deposit.

We also try to pay promptly. It’s fairly common for freelance writers to wait weeks or even months to get paid for a piece. We would like to eventually get everyone paid on or before the date of publication. As it is, we usually manage to get payments processed within a week or two after publication. 

For a time in 2023, we got too behind on our freelance payments, so we decided to drastically scale back new freelance assignments until we could take care of the backlog. This forced us to take a fresh look at our budget and process for freelancer pay. We worked together to completely revamp our processes for tracking these expenses and mapped out a detailed freelance budget for 2024, one that accounts for the ups and downs different areas of coverage tend to experience throughout the year. We’re proud to say that we’ve started the new year with a much better handle on all of this.

Other big expenses for us included paying our attorney and bookkeeper (well worth it) and paying a revenue share to Indiegraf Media, who provide the tech stack behind our website and help us conduct our fundraising campaigns. Indiegraf’s revenue-share model has given small publishers like us an affordable way to get things (like a functioning website that integrates a donation system, ad software, etc.) that would otherwise be horrifically expensive. Various taxes and fees (payroll taxes, the cut our payment processor Stripe takes from donations, banking fees, etc.) added up as well. 

We still don’t rent office space for Tone Madison. We all work remotely. In 2023, we did begin occasionally meeting up at Horizon Coworking, which offered us space as an in-kind sponsorship. This gives us the flexibility to work together in-person when we want to, without the enormous financial commitment of an office lease.

That “travel” line item largely reflects Christina and Scott traveling to Philadelphia to attend the 2023 Online News Association conference, and Christina traveling to Durham, North Carolina for LION’s annual conference and awards ceremony. But! We applied for and received travel stipend funds from both LION and the Institute for Nonprofit News, which largely covered plane tickets and lodgings for those trips. Plus, the ONA conference allows some attendees to work volunteer shifts in exchange for free registration, which both Scott and Christina did. Other travel costs (cheesesteaks, etc.) were covered out-of-pocket.

Money in

Direct donations from readers were once again our largest single source of support in 2023. About 30 percent of our income came right from you, in the form of recurring monthly donations and one-time donations. 

Our total reader donations actually decreased between 2022 (just over $45k) and 2023 ($38,667.91). But that figure does not account for the $10,000 readers contributed to our successful raise for a Kiva Loan in early 2023. That is a no-interest loan, and as we pay it back, each person who contributed also gets paid back—so technically those aren’t donations, but small loans from each supporter. 

Our second-largest source of income came in the form of matching funds from NewsMatch. This national program bundles together millions of dollars from various donors and foundations, then parcels them out to hundreds of small publishers as a match for their year-end fundraising campaigns. Thanks to additional support from the Loud Hound Foundation, NewsMatch tripled the money we raised from our readers in November and December 2022, and awarded us a bonus for raising some matching funds from the community. In March 2023, NewsMatch awarded us $35,200. The best thing about NewsMatch is that these funds are unrestricted—we can spend them as we see fit, rather than on a specific project. This makes NewsMatch a crucial source of support for our operations.

The third-largest income stream: We raised $30,415 from business sponsors in 2023, up from $21,285 in 2022. We got that number up mostly by following up more consistently with businesses and organizations who were already sponsoring us, and securing larger or more frequent commitments from them. Building and maintaining those longer-term relationships has worked out a lot better than cold-calling new prospects. We did have some success bringing on new sponsors, but that is enormously time-consuming work. 

For a long time, media outlets brought in most of their income through advertising. This business model has collapsed, for a whole bunch of reasons we won’t get into here, and isn’t coming back. We’ll never be or try to be a primarily ad-supported publication. Business sponsorships instead give us one helpful revenue stream that’s in balance with reader donations and grants. 

In any case, we know we can only grow that revenue stream so much. We don’t allow sponsors to influence editorial coverage, and our uncompromising voice probably scares off a lot of prospects. We’re also picky about who we work with. Additionally, a lot of local businesses and organizations just genuinely don’t have a lot of money to devote to this, or choose to spend their donation/marketing dollars elsewhere, and that is totally OK! Others might have the means to sponsor us, but don’t understand the value of supporting local journalism with actual cash. We’ve had a lot of frustrating conversations over the years with potential sponsors who ask to pay us in trade. That mostly doesn’t work for us, because we need to raise money to pay our operating expenses. 

We recognize our sponsors’ support through displays on the website and in our email newsletters. If you’d like to support our work and be thanked in front of a great audience, please get in touch! 

Coming in fourth: Grants. We received $20,000 in unrestricted funding from the LION Sustainability Audit program. LION also awarded us a $1,300 cash prize for winning one of the organization’s local journalism awards for our in-depth reported series “Post-Roe family planning in Madison.” We divided up the prize money, putting some back in Tone Madison‘s banking account and paying the rest to the freelancers who contributed to the series. (We had already paid them for their work, but it didn’t seem fair for us to keep all the prize money for what was very much a group effort.)

Add together the NewsMatch money, the LION grant money, and the Kiva Loan, and you can see one of our crucial weaknesses as an organization: We rely far too heavily on a few large cash infusions spaced throughout the year. In between, we still have money coming in from donors and business sponsors, but cash flow can get tricky. This means that we need to keep steadily growing small-dollar reader donations, cultivate a base of “major” donors, and/or develop new revenue streams. All of that is on the table as we continue to budget and plan and fundraise in 2024.

Our first year as a co-op

In January 2023, Tone Madison officially became a worker-owned cooperative. The core staff (currently, our publisher and three section editors) collectively own the company and form its board of directors. Typically, worker-owned cooperatives issue shares of stock to each worker-owner, and can pay out dividends to them in a profitable year. We did it a little differently, organizing Tone Madison without capital stock. We have explored forming our own 501c3 non-profit organization and believe the stock-less setup would make for a smoother transition. Currently, we are still technically a for-profit company that raises donations and grants through a non-profit fiscal receiver. But because we are organized without capital stock, any surplus money we make goes right back into the publication.

We turned Tone Madison into a worker co-op because the structure was a good fit for the way we already ran things: collaboratively, with lots of internal accountability, and most importantly, with the actual journalists (and for a time, our fundraising manager) in charge of everything. This shields our coverage from outside interference. There’s no outside parent company, no shareholders to enrich, no ill-informed meddling from overpaid executives. Journalism is a public good and should be shielded from market forces as much as possible.

The tradeoff is that it’s pretty hard to be a worker-owner. On top of doing your actual job, you have to take on a leadership role and spend time holding board meetings, reviewing budgets, making difficult higher-level decisions. It’s a lot for an already overworked group of journalists who don’t have a whole lot of experience running a business. We still have a lot to learn about cooperative governance and a lot of decisions to make. But we also learned a great deal in our first year as a worker co-op and stepped up to the challenge. We think the tradeoff is worth it.

Since 2019, the non-profit venue and arts incubator Communication Madison has served as our fiscal sponsor. At the end of 2023, Communication stopped doing fiscal sponsorship, though our two organizations still have a strong and valued partnership. As of January 1, 2024, our fiscal sponsor is MadWorC, a local non-profit consortium of worker-owned cooperatives. So far it’s been a great fit—MadWorC has a lot of experience serving as a fiscal sponsor to other organizations, and really understands our needs as a small worker co-op. Our agreement with MadWorC enables us to continue receiving grant funding and tax-deductible donations.

We have been talking internally for some years about applying for our own non-profit status. To be honest, we’re still weighing the pros and cons of that. 

Our coverage and audience

We published 288 stories on the Tone Madison website in 2023. That number is all of ’em: in-depth reported stories, interviews with musicians and filmmakers, the grab bag of rants and trivialities that is our Microtones column, a handful of housekeeping/fundraising posts, some shorter previews of shows and screenings, the big ones, the small ones, all of it!

We published 21 original editorial illustrations accompanying written pieces and six pieces of comics journalism. We sent out 49 editions of our Thursday newsletter (subscribers get the first read of the Microtones column as well as, once per month, Sami Schalk’s Pleasure Practices column) and introduced a new, just-the-links Tuesday email newsletter. We held three editions of our Tone Madison Office Hours gatherings, hosted one very successful concert with the Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra at Garver Feed Mill, and collaborated with Communication to hold a vintage and record sale in June. We worked with 32 freelance writers and nine freelance illustrators.

We did have to put a pause on publishing a Madison events calendar, which has honestly been a struggle since the pandemic began. We’d like to have a tightly curated but useful batch of event previews every week. To do it right, we’d need to be able to afford more staff hours and a larger freelance budget. We won’t get there until we’re able to raise a great deal more money from readers and/or business sponsors.

We try not to fret too much about traffic from day to day. If even a few dozen people read a given post and find it worthwhile, that makes it worth the effort to us. It’s a niche world! Still, some interesting numbers from the ol’ analytics:

• The site had 323,716 pageviews from 192,060 users.
• Search engines outpaced social as a source of traffic. By a lot! 
• Our traffic sources broke down this way:
  • Organic search: 36%
  • Social: 21%
  • Referral: 21%
  • Direct: 20%
  • Email newsletters: 2%
• Our politics coverage got more traffic than any of our other work, by far. 

Impact!

We took home the Collaboration of the Year Award in the Micro/Small Revenue Tier at Local Independent Online News Publishers’ (LION) 2023 LION Local Journalism Awards, for our six-part reported series “Post-Roe family planning in Madison.” We shared this award with our friends and collaborators at the Madison Minutes newsletter. Tone Madison News and Politics Editor Christina Lieffring even had the honor of accepting the award in-person at LION’s annual awards ceremony in Durham, North Carolina.

This is the first time in its nearly 10-year life that Tone Madison has won a real, grown-up journalism award. It felt like a huge vindication. Our work just doesn’t often fit into the categories of most of the awards programs out there. Even where we do just possibly fit, we’re usually competing with better-funded, more established outlets. Additionally, it almost always costs money to submit work for consideration to a journalism awards program. With our budget, we can’t justify that unless there is some kind of cash prize on offer.  

On the awards front, we were also grateful to receive our second Madison Area Music Award for Local Music Publication/Blog of the Year, as Steven noted above.

Our journalism made a real difference for small venues and independent artists in Madison. In July, we reported that ticketing company Brown Paper Tickets owed thousands of dollars in delayed payouts to Madison-area clients including Arts + Literature Laboratory and the recently launched Dirt Camp Music Festival. After the story went live, BPT paid up. Other people around the country saw the story and kept reaching out about their own problems with BPT. We published a follow-up story in November, which, once again, shamed the ticket company into making good on at least some of its debts. This directly demonstrates the value of reporting on the arts as a business—because it’s a business where small venues, promoters, and artists often get ripped off.

Defining a publication’s “impact” is tricky in all sorts of ways. We’d like to think we impacted the local conversation simply by publishing coverage no one else had and highlighting perspectives that weren’t a priority for other local media outlets. As unionized workers at CUNA Mutual (later renamed TruStage) turned up the pressure on a prolonged contract battle, longtime labor activist and writer Frank Emspak offered a deep historical perspective on the company’s public image and changing business model. JT Cestkowski and Alice Herman reported further updates as the struggle escalated to a strike and ran into further obstacles after said strike.

UW-Madison rolled out new family leave policies in April 2024. The real credit for this change goes to campus unions and other groups who’ve pushed for it through years of advocacy. Still, we’d like to think that JT’s aforementioned May 2023 story on the lack of family leave at UW helped to wear down the powers that be, through both its incisive reporting and JT’s relentless use of horse-related puns.

After Rachel Litchman published her first Tone Madison piece on inaccessible bus stops, Rachel wrote on her Instagram that she’s “been meeting with city officials and Metro Transit with other community leaders to try and push Metro to add back some of the stops they removed in their ‘redesign.'” We’re proud to continue platforming her work and her advocacy.  

Our coverage shaped the conversation in all sorts of small but meaningful ways: Opening up new opportunities for a great freelance illustrator, providing a useful reference point for national music publication Stereogum‘s coverage of Madison-based musician Graham Hunt, and unfortunately provoking a former Dane County Sheriff into lashing out at criticism that he couldn’t substantively rebut. 

Also, after our scathing investigation into MuckRack’s technical issues with our website and a glitch that attributed various Tone Madison stories to a mysterious entity known as “a Locker Room,” MuckRack reached out to let us know they had resolved said issues and removed the “a Locker Room” profile. In memory of “a Locker Room,” we’ll continue our efforts to make the internet a better place in 2024.