Our Wisconsin Magazine
Overview
Our Wisconsin Magazine is a bimonthly magazine devoted entirely to everyday life in Wisconsin, published from Manitowish Waters, a small community in the state's northern Northwoods lake country. Its defining characteristic is its source material: the magazine is built largely from stories and photographs submitted by its own readers, celebrating the people, places, traditions and small pleasures of life across the state. It appears every other month, is printed entirely on high-gloss paper with an emphasis on scenic photography, and has been described as the most popular publication devoted to Wisconsin. Its editorial promise is deliberately upbeat — an entertaining, cheerful read made up of stories supplied by Wisconsinites themselves.
The magazine follows a publishing model with deep Wisconsin roots: reader-written content, a warm and unhurried tone, and a focus on subscribers rather than on news. Its editor Mike Beno has summarised the approach plainly — the staff are storytellers and entertainers rather than journalists chasing scoops, and everything in the magazine is intended to be upbeat, cheerful, friendly and bright. In a media environment dominated by conflict, the magazine set out to brighten its readers' day, and to treat readers honestly and as individuals, with editorial decisions judged by whether they make life easier and better for the subscriber.
History and Founding
Our Wisconsin was launched in the early 2010s and was approaching its tenth anniversary in 2023. The magazine grew out of conversations between two veterans of Wisconsin magazine publishing: Roy Reiman, the founder of Reiman Publications, and Mike Beno, who had worked under Reiman and risen to editorial director of the company that was eventually purchased by Reader's Digest, overseeing thirteen publications with some sixteen million subscribers. Beno had earlier spent twelve years at Ducks Unlimited before joining Reiman's operation near Milwaukee, where he saw at first hand how successful magazines could be when built properly around reader contributions.
In 2004 Beno stepped back from that career and moved to northern Wisconsin, spending nine years, as he put it, stringing together charity work — installing LifeLines in older people's homes, chairing the local food pantry and church council, and a stint on Wisconsin Public Radio. Reiman, meanwhile, had famously flunked retirement after selling his company, and was looking for something new. From their shared restlessness came the idea for Our Wisconsin, following Reiman's proven model of relying on readers for content and building a publication that was one hundred percent about its subscribers. Reiman, along with a small team of handpicked editors, started Our Wisconsin and its companion Our Iowa for his home state; both became widely successful and continued publishing. The launch itself followed the classic pattern Beno later described in print: months of planning the format, design and content, gathering material for a magazine that did not yet exist to show anyone, assembling a first issue of some sixty-eight pages, printing enough copies to test the market — and then waiting for the first responses from strangers.
Content and Reader Contributions
The heart of the magazine is its reader-generated model. Stories and photographs arrive from subscribers across Wisconsin, and the editorial work consists of selecting, shaping and presenting that material. The result is a cross-section of ordinary life that conventional reporting rarely captures. A representative issue described in coverage of the magazine included a story about a family that bakes 30,000 cookies annually, a piece on falconry, the story of a former accordion salesman who created a frozen pizza empire, a church in the small community of Irma, and a model airplane builder — a mixture of food, craft, faith, enterprise and hobby that captures the magazine's range.
Photography is central. The magazine is printed one hundred percent on high-gloss paper and includes a wealth of scenic photographs, many of them reader-supplied images of Wisconsin landscapes, wildlife, small towns and seasonal change. The state's four distinct seasons, its lakes and forests, its farmland and its festivals give contributing photographers an inexhaustible subject list, and the magazine's pages function in part as a shared family album for the state.
Editorial Philosophy
Few magazines state their philosophy as openly as Our Wisconsin. The magazine does not tell people how to live their lives better, does not pursue exposés, and does not chase breaking news. Instead it tells stories, aiming to entertain and to lift the reader's mood — Beno has joked that reading enough of it might give you diabetes, and that this sweetness is deliberate, because the rest of the world is filled with strife. The staff regard subscription renewals as the honest measure of their work: whatever keeps readers renewing is done to the magazine's advantage, and whatever harms renewals is done at its peril.
That philosophy is a direct inheritance from the Reiman publishing tradition, which built some of America's largest-circulation magazines on reader contributions, homestyle subjects and — in the original Reiman titles — the complete absence of advertising. Our Wisconsin adapts that inheritance to a single state: Wisconsin itself becomes the subject, and its residents become the authors.
Circulation and Audience
The magazine is published every other month and has reported a readership of about 100,000. Within three years of its launch it had become, by the assessment of those who follow Wisconsin publishing, the most popular publication devoted to the state — a notable achievement for a magazine launched into a period of sustained contraction across the print industry. Its audience is statewide but rooted in the communities its readers write about: small towns, farm country, the Northwoods vacation region, and the cities of the south and east. Readers are not a passive audience but the magazine's contributor base, which gives its circulation an unusual loyalty — subscribers see their neighbours, their photographs and their own stories in its pages.
Ownership and Publisher
Our Wisconsin was founded by publisher Roy Reiman with editor Mike Beno and is published from Manitowish Waters in Vilas County, with its office at 5301 Townline Road, Suite 4, Manitowish Waters, WI 54545. Reiman, an Iowa farm boy who came to Wisconsin and built a publishing empire from modest beginnings — his often-told story starts with a Royal typewriter on a TV tray in a basement — became one of the most successful independent magazine publishers in America, at his peak reaching millions of subscribers across a dozen or more titles. After selling that company and retiring, he returned to launch Our Iowa and Our Wisconsin with a small handpicked editorial team. Reiman died in September 2024, and tributes in Wisconsin noted the two late-career state magazines among his lasting contributions. Beno, who remained active as a Northwoods editor into his retirement years, has been the magazine's editorial voice and public face, speaking about its founding and philosophy at events such as the Northwoods Book Festival.
Digital Presence
The magazine's website, ourwisconsinmag.com, supports subscriptions, advertising and reader contact, and carries practical publishing information including advertising rate material directed at businesses that want to reach its statewide readership. The digital presence is deliberately in service of the print product: the website introduces the magazine, invites readers into its community and handles the commercial business of subscriptions and advertising, while the full reader-contributed experience remains the printed, high-gloss bimonthly issue.
Place in Wisconsin Publishing
Our Wisconsin belongs to a long Wisconsin tradition of reader-centred publishing that includes the nationally known Reiman titles produced in the Milwaukee area, but it narrows that tradition's focus to a single state and a single community of contributors. Its success during a difficult era for print demonstrated an appetite for positive, participatory regional media: a magazine in which the readers are the reporters, the photographers and the subject. Based in the Northwoods town of Manitowish Waters rather than in a metropolitan media centre, it embodies its own premise — that the most interesting stories in Wisconsin are the ones its people tell about themselves.
Availability
Our Wisconsin Magazine is published bimonthly and is available primarily by subscription, with subscription and advertising information available through its website and its Manitowish Waters office. Gift subscriptions and reader contributions are part of the magazine's ongoing relationship with its audience, and new readers are invited to join the contributor community whose stories and photographs fill each issue.
