By Tim Carlisle
Past NPC Executive Director
The Northside News was created way back in 1995 when the then two-year-old Northside Planning Council (NPC) was looking for a way to highlight all the positive things that were going on in our Northside community.
If you subscribed to Madison’s (then) two daily newspapers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the only news reported about the Northside was negative, focusing on crime, gang activity, drug use, poverty, neglected housing, and struggling or vacant businesses.
In fact, the “Northside” was almost never called by that name in newspaper articles, but instead would be usually be identified as “part of the east side “ or as “the neighborhoods around Oscar Mayer” or the airport.
Starting in 1993 with the formation of NPC and efforts by the City and other organizations to improve conditions in several “troubled” Northside neighborhoods and schools, Northside residents began working together to create new, positive stories in our neighborhoods, and a new identity for our community began to emerge.
Now the Northside just needed a way to share the stories of the good things happening in our community, and to tell our neighbors how they could get involved. And so in August 1995, the Northside News was born.
Like all babies, the birth of a new community newspaper required a lot of labor. In these days of instant communication at the press of a button, it is hard to remember that thirty years ago, a “newspaper” was exactly that –words printed in real ink on real paper. Printed words that were delivered to your home or business in your mailbox, or by your neighbor.
And those words had to be gathered by talking to people in person or on the phone and then written into stories about what was happening in our neighborhoods, schools, churches, parks, scout troops, nonprofits and businesses. We published stories about Northside residents and organizations who were making a difference. Other stories told the history of the Northside, the issues that we were concerned about, and the things we loved about our community.
Then there were photos to be taken – on film that needed developed and printed. Ads from Northside businesses needed to be solicited, and we sometimes had to copy them out of other publications, hand-draw them, or design them using primitive clip art.
From the beginning, the Northside News has largely been written, photographed, and partly distributed by Northside residents who volunteer their time and talent, organized by the very small Northside News paid staff who serve as editors and production team. Many volunteers had never written for publication before.
The Northside Planning Council wanted the Northside News to be delivered free to every Northside household and business, and the generous support of our Northside businesses made that goal possible from the beginning.
In those early days we laid out the stories and columns on an elderly, donated desktop computer which sometimes crashed, printed the text out on large sheets of paper, and drove the pages 25 miles out to Black Earth Publishing in the early morning hours. There we used hot wax to paste the text and photos and ads onto gridded sheets, then watched as metal plates coated with ink transferred the images onto rolls of newsprint fed into the huge room-sized printing press.
No matter how long it took us to put that current issue together – usually requiring at least one and sometimes two all-nighters for the final push – it was always a sweet experience to watch the papers roll off the press, to hold the stories and images of our community in our hands, and imagine the copies arriving in the homes and businesses of thousands and thousands of our neighbors.
In those first issues the Northside News we shared a big dream for our community – a new gathering place and recreation center in Warner Park that would serve our entire community. Later issues highlighted other big dreams – of saving land for community gardens and creating an urban farm on Troy Drive, of building new neighborhood centers in Vera Court and Northport – Packer complexes, and many other smaller efforts to create new businesses and neighborhood associations and parentteacher organizations.
The Northside News highlighted our long-time and new local businesses and the revitalization of our shopping centers. We invited public officials to write columns each issue to keep Northsiders informed of opportunities to shape public decisions, and to respond to neighborhood concerns. We invited Northside service providers and police and library staff to share information on upcoming events and services available to residents.
We encouraged older residents to share their memories of Northside history. Who knew that the big red brick building on Lake View Hill was a former tuberculosis sanitarium with its own patient-produced newsletter and a pond named “Sputum Lake”?
Who knew that downtown residents used to take a ferry across the lake to promenade on the grounds of Mendota Mental Health Institute (formerly the Wisconsin Hospital for the Insane), or to visit “Rocky Roost” – a Frank Lloyd Wright designed cabin complex built in the lake near Governor’s Island? Or that part of the golf course at Cherokee was built near the site of a large pig farm? Or that a favorite sled-riding hill in Warner Park is made largely of mucky dirt dredged from creating Warner Park lagoon?
The Northside News didn’t just inform residents what was happening, it aimed to inspire residents to get involved and contribute to their community. As a prime example, after several years of coverage almost in every issue, our Northside community joined together to raise over $800,000 to gain City approval of federal funds for the construction of Warner Park Center.
Within four years of that first issue, the headlines of the Northside News in 1999 were filled with news of the grand opening of Warner Park Center, of the saving of Troy Gardens, and – very proudly – of our little Northside community winning the prestigious National Neighborhood of the Year award.
That year, the Wisconsin State Journal’s September 17 headline read: “North Side Tops Off Its Success Story – New Community Center Is A Symbol of The Neighborhood’s Remarkable Triumph Over Drugs, Gangs, And Other Problems”.
But Northsiders didn’t need a big city newspaper to tell us that our Northside community was a success story. We had joined together to write that story –– in our very own community newspaper. And thirty years later, we can all be proud that the Northside News is still arriving at the homes of Northside residents, and still telling the stories of our community.
