You Could Make This Place Beautiful
On the death of Tone Madison, the specter of the college town, and moving on
The cliche about Madison is that it is a transitory place. People come here to get a degree, start a career, then move onto somewhere bigger and better. Of course there is something true to that; the city's economy is very much dependent on the purchasing power and exploitable labor of college students who get cycled through anew every year.
I've seen many people come and go, it's part of life. It does make me a little sad to say goodbye to a friend who is leaving for somewhere else, but it is tempered by the knowledge that I will almost certainly soon meet some interesting weird person who's new in town. Once you become attached to a place, life is full of these bittersweet ebbs and flows.
And attached I am - I love Madison. This is the place where I figured out how to be a real person. The place where I met some of the most important people in my life. The place where I got married.
There is a certain kind of person who lingers here, who doesn't move out after they get fired from Epic.
For those who stay, the city is defined by its institutions; the businesses and organizations who have become synonymous with the city itself. Everyone has a spot.
The Caribou. The Paradise. Fair Oaks Diner. Madison Sourdough. Four Star Video. Teddywedgers. The Tornado Room. Willaby's. The Village Bar. Le Tigre Lounge. That one bar where you can eat breakfast and watch porn at the same time, if that suits you. The list goes on.
Of course the local place is not exclusive to Madison or the college town generally. (If Big Chicks in Chicago ever closes I will be on suicide watch) However, it does have a resonance for the long-timers. This is our place, this is what makes this city special.
You accumulate all this useless knowledge that doesn't mean anything to people outside this relatively small metro region. You form an in-depth mental map of landmarks like that one laundromat that has been closed since COVID or that one bar they'll let you smoke cigarettes in. Then the laundromat reopens, or the entire block that dingy bar was at is now a Target. It's disorienting.
Much has been said about Madison losing character as it increases in size; our fair city's newspapers love running op-eds by west side suburbanites complaining about the new high rises, low income housing near their neighborhoods, the rapid transit line. The common refrain is that we are losing our small town character, an absurd statement for a city with currently over two hundred thousand people living in it.
I never went to UW Madison. I don't have the nostalgia that they do. I'm not interested in living inside of someone else's youth. This is a living breathing city and not everything can be preserved in amber.
Change isn't bad - but what are we changing towards?
I've lived here seven years. I don't really feel like that's long enough to comfortably claim townie status but the Madison of 2026 is indeed a very different place than the Madison of 2019. The East Washington corridor is full of high rises when years ago it was warehouses and fence museums. I can now take the bus and get to the other side of town in 30 minutes. There are more people than before and more are coming.
Still, for every good thing that comes to our town, it does feel like we lose another. The old-timers are right about that, even if we disagree on what the good is. Rising rent and cost of living is driving many of our institutions out of town or out of business entirely. On March 20th, independent news magazine Tone Madison announced that after 12 years it was no longer financially feasible to keep the organization running. With Tone's closure, journalism in this city undoubtedly will be worse off.
Tone was the place I went to for coverage about Madison's housing crisis and the condition of Wisconsin's prisons. It covered events that went unnoticed by the rest of Madison's media and regularly published arts criticism. There is so much of the last decade of Madison's history in its archives.
In the bleak world of print journalism, 12 years for an independent news magazine is nothing short of a miracle. We were lucky to get that much.
I feel lucky that I was able to publish some of my own writing there before the end. I am grateful that as a trans woman I was able to passionately write about issues that affect people in my community without being censored. In a media environment where trans people are either ignored or demonized, and never never allowed to speak for themselves, that's meaningful.
There are cities larger than us that didn't have a Tone Madison. As a friend often puts it, Tone was one of the many areas where Madison punches above its weight.
In its absence there is nothing here quite like it.
Art can't survive in an environment that doesn't nurture it. Our state government doesn't care to do much of anything and our federal government is actively hostile to life itself. The vibrancy of an art scene has less to do with some innate quality of the scene itself and more to do with investment. Whether that investment is institutional support or the personal sacrifices of artists.
In a system that doesn't value it, maintaining an independent art or writing practice feels like protecting a small fire from a great headwind.
In my senior year of journalism school in Chicago, a professor counseled me on what I should do after graduation. He told me that if I wanted a real career in news writing, I would have to move to LA or NYC. That struck me as a cruel thing to say at the time, to abandon my friends and family to have a career. Why couldn't I have both?
I'm a student again, community college instead of a fancy catholic school. I meet students who are the same age that I once was, who want to go into journalism when they graduate. I give them the same exact advice that I was given eight years ago.
The path of the journo was ultimately not the one I went down, nor is it the direction my life is headed now. Our media landscape is too volatile to have a stable career in it, unless you are very lucky, or rich enough to ignore it. For everyone else, it is a constant struggle. Then again, people told me the same thing in 2013. It's worth trying to make something true, isn't it?
I find it difficult to square these two feelings. I want to say I believe in passion and care, that cleverness and good intention can overcome any obstacle. But this is a desolate place.
I'm certain there will be a successor to Tone in some fashion. The readership is there. People are still making art in Madison. We are a growing city now without any major leftist, progressive publication. As rent keeps rising and the contradictions of daily life continue to manifest, there will be a demand for justice and reporting that reflects reality.
Too often in adulthood we have to choose between what's practical and what nourishes the soul. Rarely do they ever coincide. I want to believe in a world where our work is valued and we can live off of it. I want to fight for that. I hope it takes. I hope we win. *