Welcome to the Madison Commons, a website designed to provide news and information about all of Madison's neighborhoods and a crossroads for the discussion of community issues. The name comes from the idea of a village commons, a place for news, talk, debate, and some entertainment, too, that's open to everyone.

Our goal is to gather stories from all of Madison's neighborhoods in one accessible place. We are training citizen journalists from across Madison to report on their own neighborhoods in a series of workshops on the East, South, and North sides.

To do this, we are partnering with the East Isthmus Neighborhood Planning Council (EINPC), the Eastside News, the South Metropolitan Planning Council (SMPC) and its Southern Exposure, and the Northside Planning Council (NPC) and its Northside News. We are also working with the Simpson Street Free Press to train young reporters. If you are interested in becoming a citizen journalist, please contact us at deshano@wisc.edu.

We are a project of the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication and its Center for Communication and Democracy. Some of our reports will come from advanced undergraduate and Masters students in the School. The Commons Project is funded by the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment and a New Voices grant from J-Lab and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

We are cooperating with The Capital Times, Wisconsin State Journal, Isthmus, and Channel 3000 as well. These news organizations are allowing us to republish some of their community stories on the Madison Commons website. When we do this, all material will be clearly marked so that you, the reader, can tell where it comes from.

Finally, we see this as a beginning. We will be reaching out to other media in Madison, our weekly newspapers, radio and television stations, as well as to the independent blogosphere to make the Commons a site reflecting all of Madison.

Lew Friedland, Project Director
Cathy DeShano, Project Coordinator
Nak ho Kim, Technical Coordinator

Questions, problems, suggestions? Please contact us at:

Madison Commons Project
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
5115 Vilas Communication Hall
821 University Ave.
Madison, WI 53706-1497
Email: deshano@wisc.edu

To report a technical problem with the website, please email the webmaster.