What Tone Madison can do with $20,000

Website redevelopment, keeping the proverbial lights on, and most importantly, paying people: this is why our NewsMatch goal matters.

In case you missed it, on Monday we announced Tone Madison is converting to a worker-owned cooperative. It’s exciting! We’ll be working on that for the next year, thanks to a grant from Madison Cooperative Development Coalition (MCDC). While that simmers behind-the-scenes, we have more exciting news to share.

Tone Madison’s fall 2021 fundraising campaign is our biggest yet. NewsMatch is doubling reader donations—including new monthly subscriptions—up to $10,000. While the MCDC grant will help us make changes for long-term sustainability as we transition to a worker-owned cooperative, your donations make it possible for us to pay writers, artists, and editors for their time and labor. 

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What will we do with $20,000?

• The vast majority of reader donations go directly back into the community in the form of hourly pay for a handful of staff and freelance pay for dozens of other journalists. 

• We’ll continue to keep the overhead we do have (things like website hosting, access to a few helpful digital tools, etc.) in check.

• Some of this money, along with the MCDC money, will go toward developing a new and improved Tone Madison website.

This August, Tone Madison brought a small team of part-time editors onto payroll as staff for the first time. We are making the changes needed, step-by-step, to keep this publication sustainable. It’s a balance of slowing down while we increase our capacity so that we can deliver the depth, breadth and consistency of coverage needed to keep up with local culture and politics issues for the long term.

If you value this coverage, and the commentary from journalists at Tone Madison, we ask that you consider continuing your support with a donation this fall.

Thanks for supporting us through these exciting changes!

Oona Mackesey-Green, managing editor

Scott Gordon, publisher

There’s more where this came from.

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