Eastside News celebrating 100 years

By Dave Link, Eastside News

2024 is a special year for Eastside News. It’s the year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of its inception, not counting a false start in 1912.

Readers of Eastside News can expect to find reprints of past articles from different eras in upcoming issues and a special pull-out section commemorating the centennial in the July-August edition. Plus, there’s a fundraising campaign to help ESN continue for another century.

A brief history

In 1912, A.W. Larson published two issues of The East Side News that October. Publication abruptly ended with the with the Oct. 19 edition. After 12 years of absence, Marshall Browne published East Side News Dec. 4, 1924, from his print shop near Schenk’s Corners.

Ownership passed through publishers before ending sometime in the latter half of the 1960s or 1970s. Records are incomplete about the time frame.

In February 1981, the Atwood Community Center — now known as the Goodman Community Center — re-branded the Atwood Alive publication as East Side News. In 1995, the name was condensed to Eastside News. The center is still the publisher.

What 100 years old means

Being around for 100 years is a long time for a small publication. Even GCC’s 43 years of producing Eastside News is impressive. That’s well over 2,500 editions that showed up in neighborhood mailboxes and news racks. All from a neighborhood nonprofit.

A lot has changed since those early copies. Type is no longer set using crude (but innovative at the time) Linotype machines, color is typical and computers eliminate many hours of tedious paste up.

While not continuously published, having a newspaper on the east side for 100 years is a big deal. It connects the community and demonstrates how the community is invested in the neighborhood. After all, a publication is only as strong as its readership.

We will be adding past issues to the Eastside News archive on the Goodman website occasionally. It's a great way to see how much things have changed — and have stayed the same.

As the early issues proclaimed and still holds true today: Madison, the best of cities — The east side, the best of Madison.