Tone Madison’s 2024 Annual Report

Assessing our financial standing as we break down the breadth and impact of our work in our 10th year as a publication.

Our annual report is a bit later than usual this year because, as you may know, we’ve been undergoing a major transition. Scott Gordon, Tone Madison co-founder and Publisher, stepped down at the end of April. While it didn’t take long for his byline to pop up again (and there will certainly be more of that in the future), the day-to-day operations of Tone Madison are now in the hands of Film Editor Grant Phipps, Music Editor Steven Spoerl, and myself. 

As a team, we spent a lot of time preparing for this transition—we became a worker-owned cooperative in 2023, cross-trained and distributed various responsibilities across the team, and adapted our publishing schedule to be more sustainable. We have also worked really hard to get Tone Madison’s finances on solid footing, so the team would be in a good position to take on the challenge of running the business.

We also got to celebrate Tone Madison’s 10th anniversary! Ten years as a fiercely independent media outlet covering arts, culture, and local politics in a media ecosystem where better-resourced outlets regularly collapse. We spent some time this year also reflecting on some of the reporting, art, and commentary we’ve published over that span with our “From The Archives” series. We also threw a 10th anniversary party at Gamma Ray Bar where we released our first foray into print media—our first zine!

While 2024 had its challenges (understatement, I know), it also brought the realization that we are not alone. We received some generous donations from individual donors and were notified about a grant opportunity (which is not contained in this report, because we received it in early 2025); both were instrumental to getting us where we are now financially. Moving forward, the challenge, as always, is figuring out how to be sustainable even during turbulent times. It is a daunting task, but the community of journalists and artists we have cultivated over the years, the work we routinely do, and the Madisonians who appreciate said work, make it all worth it. 

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

—Christina Lieffring, Managing Editor

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Our highlights of 2024

Grant Phipps, Film Editor: 

Our film coverage in 2024 was not as straightforward to summarize compared to our past couple annual reflections. In 2022, we saw an impassioned, full-on revival of in-person screenings, and in 2023, a deep exploration of local programming. However, the strength of our collective voice sustained. Core staff and freelance contributors came through time and again with colorful, insightful, and engaging writing.

Legacy media and institutions like The Capital Times and Isthmus have cast aside regular movie reviews, which makes the imprint of Tone Madison even more prominent. Our coverage isn’t simply visible during the weeks leading up to the Wisconsin Film Festival, nor is it sporadic or dictated by a committee who isn’t tuned into the most vital and exciting (not to be confused with “popular”) corners of the landscape.

In July, we started a new column, “Cinemails,” which captures the upbeat spirit and camaraderie of our year-end email conversations. The format yielded four exchanges—on the future of cinema, Longlegs, the scope and reinvention of the Alien franchise, and Anora—between writers Maxwell Courtright, Edwanike Harbour, Jason Fuhrman, Scott Gordon, Sara Batkie, and myself. The column not only permits playfully tangential discourse, but also facilitates connections that can’t exist, at least as visibly in the copy, in more traditional assessments.

And we didn’t just pair up writers either; during Oscars season, Fuhrman delivered a scrumptiously rich piece on the multisensory pleasures of matching films with food, which has already become an annual column to bring attention to local restaurants. In early March, I also penned a personal farewell to the late film scholar and UW–Madison Professor Emeritus David Bordwell. Also in March and then in May, C Nelson-Lifson and Emily Mills lent their distinctive voices on essential queer cinema like Bound (1996) and Desert Hearts (1985).

Beyond those more standalone reviews—including 12 that reflected the downtown moviegoing hub of UW Cinematheque from July through November—I also questioned the Cinematheque’s perplexing and thorny choice to initiate an international-discoveries series over the summer with a new Woody Allen feature, Coup De Chance. The point was challenged by no one else in the Madison media landscape.

Other essayistic endeavors focused on a post-festival meditation on the self-aggrandizing effect of social media on criticism as well as Batkie’s virtuous experience as a Wisconsin Film Festival volunteer. At the summit of spooky season, on Halloween, I explored Four Star Video Rental’s long-running tradition of compiling daily in-store movie themes. The staff’s keenly personalized, algorithm-less recommendations lay a path through the current era’s chaotically scattered streaming minefields.

All that only seems to acknowledge two-thirds of our 2024 output. Needless to say, it’s become Tone Madison‘s mission to uplift voices of the broader Madison-area community during a time when film criticism and discussion are morphing into influencer sponcon and simply slipping away from plain sight.

Steven Spoerl, Music Editor:

Over the course of 2024, Tone Madison‘s commitment to showcasing local music remained constant. Film Editor Grant Phipps kicked our year in music coverage off with a preview of the multimedia, multi-artist exhibit Mad Dreams Of Reason and an insightful feature exploring the “All The Sounds Are Done” performance series. Phipps would go on to contribute two more incisive previews to the music section in 2024, infusing our overall coverage with a distinct stylistic flavor. 

Freelancer Andy Moore authored two memorable—and oddly moving—features that put newly-minted business owners in the spotlight: Spruce Tree Music’s Nicholas Kehoe and Gamma Ray Bar’s Kevin Willmott II. Both pieces dug deep into the roots of why both the owners and their businesses matter, and how their respective presences will impact Madison’s music community for years to come. Moore also delivered an incredibly attentive and caring profile of Americana singer-songwriter John Hardin, and a clear-eyed Microtones on Wisconsin musicians’ relationship to alcohol and sobriety. Each of those four pieces were defined by Moore’s hard-won knowledge and his singular, unmistakable charm.

In his last full year as Tone Madison‘s Publisher, Scott Gordon contributed a quartet of great music pieces. In mid-February, Gordon celebrated the long, rich history of Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble in a rightfully effusive preview. Two months later, Gordon spoke with All Tiny Creatures’ Thomas Wincek about the project’s recent material and long-developing artistry. A few weeks after that, he grappled with how Madison showgoers could be affected by the Department Of Justice’s then-impending antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation. Gordon’s appreciative piece for the truly remarkable “Cool Building Day” shirt in late November evidenced his cutting wit and ineffable knack for attending to Madison’s curios.

As for me: over the course of roughly 40 pieces, I strived to balance a number of recurring series, standalone reviews, event previews, balanced commentary, remembrances, and expansive profiles, all while maintaining a hyper-local focus. Throughout that process, I made conscious attempts to expand the breadth of who was being featured. Cultivating an even playing field for local artists was a goal that Tone Madison pursued throughout 2024 and continues to pursue into 2025.

To close out our 2024—and celebrate Tone Madison‘s 10th year—I orchestrated a 40-track fundraiser compilation, put together a multi-genre anniversary party at Gamma Ray Bar, and spearheaded our year-end coverage. In a city that absolutely has the journalistic infrastructure to support multiple outlets taking part in more emphatically highlighting the year’s memorable releases, Tone Madison was the only one to run substantial year-end coverage once more.

All of these efforts culminate in a way that continues to set Tone Madison apart from its contemporaries. We are extremely committed to giving local music the care, attention, and platform it deserves. And that won’t be changing anytime soon.

Christina Lieffring, News and Politics Editor:

Looking back at our news and politics coverage in 2024, I can proudly say that we have continued to explore stories and topics that are often overlooked or misrepresented by other local media outlets. 

Some of these stories aimed to burst Madison’s “we’re so liberal” bubble. Prompted by the revelation that artist Kay LeClaire was a “Pretendian,” we started the year with an investigation by Rodlyn-Mae Banting and Jenny Fierro into how Madison’s segregation and institutions enable race fraud. It is unfortunately unsurprising that our 2024 politics coverage was bookended by incidents highlighting the danger of Madison (and Fitchberg) failing to see, much less address, the racism that runs rampant in this community.

We also covered the way Madison Common Council and local media failed to address the credible accusations made by multiple women, including a then-sitting Alder, that former Alder Charles Myadze had harassed or abused them. Madison continues to build so-called “affordable” housing that Rachel Litchman’s political comic (which received an Honorable Mention award from the National Center on Disability and Journalism) pointed out were neither affordable nor accessible. Madison homeowners tried to use renters as a shield to justify cutting City services to save themselves $19 per month in property taxes. The City also takes pride and profits from its arts community, and indeed pours unaccounted-for money into the Overture Center, but drags out the public art process to make it unviable for independent artists. Oh, also, during an extended September heat wave, we stressed that Madison is not a climate haven.

Scott Gordon doggedly reported on Act 253, a law that quietly passed in early 2024 and could have serious consequences for Wisconsin’s open records law, access to police body-camera footage, and police accountability in general. Act 253 has received little press coverage since, and certainly not any deep dives comparable to Gordon’s. As a result of his reporting, local officials were made aware of the law, its implications, and were able to stave off an ordinance that would have quietly implemented it in the City of Madison.

One point of pride is how often and extensively we covered the genocide in Gaza, its impact on the 2024 Presidential election, and how Democrats’ failure to meet the moment alienated ceasefire advocates from the party. We also covered the crackdown on protests to the genocide on campuses. We were on the ground for the peaceful UW-Madison encampment, the violence instigated by the cops against protesters, and pushed back against bad takes about the encampment. 

Gordon also reported on the Department of Corrections’ inconsistent policies and narratives around distributing books to prisoners. We were one of the few outlets to report on then-candidate, now elected State Rep. Andrew Hysell’s ties to a literacy program that received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds from my home state of Kansas.

In 2024, we also said goodbye to longtime labor advocate, researcher, and contributor to WORT-FM’s Labor Radio and Tone Madison, Frank Emspak.

Money

In 2024, here were our expenses:*

Staff Wages	$64,500.00
Freelancer Payments	$14,200.00
Indiegraf Revenue Share	$10,400.00
Finance Fees (Stripe, PayPal, OutVoice, Banking fees, etc.)	$7,300.00
Taxes	$7,550.00
Legal & Professional Services	$6,100.00
Subscriptions / Tech Stack	$2,560.00
Advertising and Marketing	$2,125.00
Insurance	$1,140.00
Other Expenses (Including Dues to Membership Organizations, Business Supplies, etc.)	$1,870.00
Travel	$510.00
Total Expenses	$118,255.00

And our revenues:*

Reader Donations	$57,580.00
Matching funds via NewsMatch	$31,800.00
Sponsorships	$21,900.00
Grants	$5,260.00
Events Revenue	$1,670.00
Merch Sales	$220.00
Total Income	$118,430.00

*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.

Overall, we came out just barely ahead in 2024, after running at a slight loss in 2023. Just to break even took constant and diligent budgeting. As the worker-owners of this publication, we all participate in its financial oversight and management—making in-the-weeds spending decisions together, balancing our priorities, and, well, not kidding ourselves about the obstacles any small media outlet faces in this day and age. We’re not going to shrug our shoulders and fall back on platitudes about “economic headwinds.” Whatever the challenges, we take responsibility for facing them head-on.

Money out

Let’s be real: Good journalism isn’t cheap. It’s labor-intensive. It requires a support structure. Media owners and tech grifters are always trying to find ways to make it cheap. We believe this is a dead end. Instead, our approach is to be honest with ourselves about the costs of this work, and prioritize our spending as best we can.

In 2024, we spent about $12,000 less overall than we did in 2023. That is in large part because we decided to publish fewer stories overall. We deliberately slowed down our editorial calendar, to keep putting out work at a reliable pace, but to help ourselves make the most of our limited and increasingly strained work hours, balance our editorial and administrative responsibilities, and make sure that each story gets the attentive hands-on editing it deserves. This was hard, because we always want to do more. But it made Tone Madison more sustainable in the long run, and put us in a better position to eventually ramp up capacity and publishing over time.

This meant we assigned far fewer stories and editorial illustrations to freelancers in 2024. We kept our freelance pay rates the same, but our overall payments to freelancers came down by about $10,000 from the previous year. This did not remotely make us happy. We work with an incredible group of freelancers who are absolutely essential to the life and variety of this publication. We love paying them!  Some years, we’ve spent more than $30,000 on freelancer payments. This is an expense we want to maximize, not minimize. 

Of course, there were other options for making our editorial workload more sustainable or for reducing our spending:

• Reducing our freelance pay rates. We consider this unacceptable. Our rates are actually higher than what a lot of bigger local and even national publications pay freelance writers and illustrators. Yes, really. They’re still not quite what we’d like to pay. It’s the right thing to do, but also serves a practical purpose. Abysmal pay rates drive people away from journalism in general. If people can’t afford to spend time on this work, they won’t. Paying as decently as we’re able helps us build better working relationships with our freelancers, making them more likely to keep working with us. Publications that pay freelancers poorly (or, worse, ask people to work for free) end up paying for it on the other end, because they have higher turnover among freelancers, and therefore have to spend more time and effort recruiting new ones. 

• Compromising on our editing process. We could save money and probably crank out a lot more Content if we rushed things, didn’t fuss so much over edits, and didn’t get multiple sets of eyes on everything before publishing it. Our editing process does take a lot of time and effort. We’ve worked to make it more systematic and organized over the years. But skimping on it in the name of efficiency would be a disservice to both our readers and our journalists. Our freelancers like the fact that we put so much care into editing their work. Even the most experienced writers out there benefit from thoughtful editing. Our editing process often serves as a training ground for people who are newer to journalism (in other words, we pick up a lot of slack for larger publications and journalism schools that aren’t doing enough to teach people the ropes), which means we’re able to bring in a wider variety of voices. We want readers to be able to depend on us for factual accuracy and readability. Quality control is inefficient, but it’s worth it.

• Cutting hours or pay for staff editors. We have a staff of four people, all working part-time, for $16 an hour. We’ve kept that hourly rate flat for a while now for the sake of the long-term budget needs of Tone Madison. But we have to acknowledge that this isn’t easy or sustainable. Everyone on the team contributes to all aspects of the business, including fundraising, and one of our goals in the near future is to raise hourly wages. If we believe journalists should be well compensated for their work, that should include us.

• Raising more money. This, of course, we can’t argue with. and are constantly working very hard to improve! Whenever we’re able to significantly increase our revenues, we’ll be plowing those resources right back into both staff and freelancers.

Even though freelance pay came down a lot and staff pay came down just slightly in 2024, those two categories together added up to about 67 percent of our budget. We’ve always spent the majority of our budget on paying journalists for their work, and we’re proud of it. We also keep our other operating costs as low as we can. Tone Madison‘s biggest overhead item, at about $10,400, was paying Indiegraf Media to maintain the back end of our website, services that also integrate fundraising tools and our email newsletter platform. From March 2022 through March 2024, we paid Indiegraf on a revenue-share basis. When our initial agreement expired, we moved to a cheaper flat-rate agreement. We also paid Indiegraf a one-time fee to provide some extra support for our year-end fundraising campaign. This was all money well-spent. Indiegraf has designed all of its tools specifically for small publishers like us, and there’s simply no way we can afford to maintain that kind of technical infrastructure in-house.

Finance fees and taxes also added up. The good news is that fees for payment processors like Stripe stayed pretty flat, and the fees we pay to our non-profit fiscal receiver, MadWorC, went up because MadWorC processed some unusually large donations for us. 

This publication still doesn’t have the expense of maintaining an office. We work remote and occasionally use a co-working space, Horizon Coworking, which still lets us use the space as an in-kind sponsorship. 

Money in

Here’s our best financial news from 2024: We raised a record $57,580 in direct reader donations! (To put that in perspective, our second-best year for reader donations so far was 2022, at about $45,000.) As always, these donations were our largest single largest source of support in 2024—covering nearly half of our budget—and unlocked matching funds (from the national NewsMatch program) that provide our second-largest income stream.

Two factors made it a banner year for donations. One, we raised a significant amount of “major gifts”—individual donations of $1,000 or more—for basically the first time ever, adding up to $21,000. Most of our individual donors give in smaller monthly or one-off increments, so it’s unusual for someone to make a multi-thousand-dollar contribution. These were unrestricted donations, meaning that we’re free to make our own choices about how we use the funds. That’s important to us, because we want to serve all our readers and do not allow donors to meddle in our editorial decisions, no matter how generous they are. Second, about 70 Tone Madison readers became first-time donors in 2024. We were able to leverage both of these facts to secure additional bonus funds from NewsMatch during our successful year-end fundraising campaign (but those did not hit the bank until 2025). 

During our year-end campaign, we also threw a successful 10th anniversary party at Gamma Ray Bar with local bands and artists. Ticket sales from that event alone brought in more than $1,000—which also counted toward NewsMatch! We also made another insane T-shirt, which didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped but is still available for purchase.

The bad news is that grant funding and business sponsorships were both way down in 2024. We place so much emphasis on direct reader donations in part because we know that grants and advertising both tend to have wild ups and downs. From year to year, it’s hard to predict how many grants make sense for us to apply for—sometimes we fit into the weird boxes that news philanthropy organizations dream up, and sometimes we don’t. At the same time, these grants are becoming more and more competitive because there is so much dire need out there for journalism funding. (We got passed over for a couple of major things in 2024, and we can’t lie, it was a little demoralizing.) We’ve continued to develop great working relationships with a small cohort of local advertisers. Ad budgets are only getting tighter, and quite frankly it’s hard to compete with bigger, blander publications with actual sales staff. Still, we’ve been able to show our advertisers the value of working with a small, niche outlet, and we appreciate the businesses and organizations in town who are willing to support courageous local journalism.

Good news or bad, we learn from it and keep on improving all our efforts to bring money in. We’ve been acting on a number of lessons from 2024. We’re making better use of our website and email newsletters to spread the word about donations and events. We stopped calling it “sponsorship” and just call it advertising now, because the sponsorship terminology felt needlessly confusing. We spruced up our media kit. We’ve placed far more emphasis on connecting with readers in-person. And in these times, we are constantly reminded just how fortunate we are to have the support of our community.

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 210 articles in total in 2024. That is fewer than previous years, but one of the hard lessons we learned in 2023 was that, while we always want to do more, there are limits to our resources— specifically time, money, and energy. In 2024, sustainability was the name of the game, and we consistently produced in-depth stories, extended interviews, and meaningful commentaries on the local music scene and film culture (even gaming). On the whole, no other local media has quite the same selective eye and substantial angle on the arts and local politics as Tone Madison.

In addition to the writing, reporting, and last–minute editorial art by staff, we published the work of 34 freelancers, including seven artists who created original editorial illustrations for us, including our first zine. We value showcasing a variety of voices and perspectives in our community.

Ahead of the publication’s 10th anniversary in the fall, we devoted a number of Thursdays to reappraising and celebrating the breadth and voice of stories “From The Archives“—some of which include a trip to the exotic club Inferno, seeing metalcore band Underoath as an acoustic duo at Geeks Mania, the empty honorings of Wisconsin’s symbolic “Forward” statue, and the 1991 butter fire at Central Storage & Warehouse.

We said farewell to our longest-running and most-consistent column, Sami Schalk’s “Pleasure Practices,” as Schalk enjoys her sabbatical. We also launched a new monthly Microtones column, “Small Bites,” by local food writer Jesse Raub.

Impact

Tone Madison received one of its highest honors to date in 2024—we were cited in Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway’s proclamation that declared June 14 “Cribshitter Day.”

In all seriousness, while we don’t get too hung up on accolades, it’s satisfying to see our work recognized. As we previously highlighted, one of our contributors, Rachel Litchman, received an Honorable Mention award from the National Center on Disability and Journalism for her political comic on how the City’s affordable housing is not accessible nor affordable. Additionally, in 2024 we received our third consecutive Madison Area Music Award for Local Music Media of the Year. (If we win the next two years in a row, they’ll cut us off and declare that we cannot win any longer.)

Aside from such official recognition, it’s hard to assess the direct influence of our journalism and arts writing. Did the Wisconsin Department of Corrections backpedal on its book ban (and try to convince everyone there never was a book ban in the first place) because of our reporting? When we last checked in, corrections officials were trying to bring the whole discussion of delivering books directly to prisoners back to square one. After years of writing about the City of Madison’s subsidy to the Overture Center, we got some answers for how that money is spent…kind of. On the 2024 Madison budget referendum—which ultimately passed—we pushed back against bad narratives about who would be impacted and what it meant more broadly. Did our reporting move the needle and influence that election? It’s impossible to say.

Tone Madison did make a mark in open-records discourse in 2024; Scott Gordon not only raised awareness of Act 253 via his reporting, but Tone Madison also hired attorney and government transparency advocate Tom Kamenick to respond to UW-Madison Police Department’s citation of Act 253 in response to our request for police body camera footage. That, in turn, prompted Kamenick to publish a white paper analyzing the law’s implications for Wisconsin’s Open Records Law, which cited Gordon’s reporting (and was then published on our website). Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council President Bill Leuders also cited Gordon’s reporting in his Your Right To Know column published by Wisconsin Watch.

Finally, we apparently got under the skin of former Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes enough that he decided he was going to give us a piece of his mind before he walked out the door to Seattle, where he is still acting as Police Chief. A win is a win.

For 10 years now, we’ve been reporting on stories that are overlooked and misunderstood in arts, film, music, and politics. And thanks to all our contributors, donors, and readers, we’re ready for 10 more.