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The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism was named a winner Tuesday of eight awards in the 2016 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism contest.

The Center now has received a total of 48 awards since 2011 in the state’s premiere all-media journalism competition.

The Center’s story examining trauma-informed care in Wisconsin, has won an award for “Best Multi-Story Coverage of a Single Feature Topic or Event” from the Milwaukee Press Club. Here, students change classes in a hallway at Lincoln Hills School for Boys in 2013. Beginning in 2012, staff at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake School for girls were trained in and began using trauma-informed care principles. Dan Young / USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

The honors recognize stories that examined risks to Wisconsin’s drinking water, the lack of universal background checks for gun purchases, financial practices that target poor consumers, the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs, the lack of protections for bees and the use of trauma-informed care in Wisconsin’s criminal justice system and elsewhere.

Sharing several awards with the Center was Bridgit Bowden, Wisconsin Public Radio’s former Mike Simonson Memorial Investigative Fellow who was embedded in the Center’s newsroom last year. University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication students, working as paid Center interns or in classroom collaborations, played important roles in four of the award-winning entries. Joint projects with Wisconsin Health News and several Milwaukee-area news organizations also received honors.

Finalists will be notified whether they have won a first, second or third place at the annual Gridiron Dinner May 12 in Milwaukee. The Center’s winners are:

Best Multi-Story Coverage of a Single Feature Topic or Event: Managing Editor Dee J. Hall and Multimedia and Digital Director Coburn Dukehart for a package of stories examining the use of trauma-informed care in Wisconsin. The stories explored how the state is confronting childhood trauma in social service, court and correctional settings.

Best Investigative Story or Series: Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism staff, along with University of Wisconsin-Madison J475 students, for Failure at the Faucet, a series that revealed numerous threats to drinking water quality in Wisconsin, including lead, arsenic, radium, strontium, pesticides and human and animal bacteria and viruses.

The Center’s staff, along with UW-Madison’s J475 students, won an award for “Best Investigative Story or Series” for the “Failure at the Faucet” series, which revealed numerous threats to drinking water quality in Wisconsin, including lead, arsenic, radium, strontium, human and animal bacteria and viruses and pesticides. Pictured here is Judy Treml and her daughter Samantha Treml, who fell ill when she was six-months old after being bathed in well water tainted by manure spread on a nearby frozen farm field. Tad Dukehart for Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Best Public Service Story or Series: Alexandra Arriaga, Coburn Dukehart and Dee J. Hall of the Center and Bridgit Bowden of Wisconsin Public Radio for a package of stories exploring why Wisconsin has failed to expand background checks to all gun purchases. These stories were produced for Precious Lives, an examination of gun violence in Milwaukee. It was a collaborative project involving the Center, 371 Productions, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WUWM Milwaukee Public Radio, and WNOV. Precious Lives won an additional four awards.

Best Investigative Report — Audio: Bridgit Bowden, reporting for both Wisconsin Public Radio and the Center, for two audio packages. One explored the lack of regulation that allows poor borrowers to be charged average interest rates of 565 percent. The other package revealed the problem of lead in Wisconsin’s drinking water. (Those stories can be heard here and here and here.)

Best Use of Multimedia: Marion Ceraso, Abigail Becker and Haley Henschel for the Center and Bridgit Bowden reporting for WPR on a multimedia package that exposed gaps in Wisconsin’s plan to save bees and other pollinators. The package featured an audio report, photos, interactive graphics and a GIF showing the growing use of a type of pesticides associated with bee die-offs.

The Center has won an award for "Best Use of Multimedia" for their story which included this graphic showing how the use of imidacloprid, a synthetic insecticide, has increased dramatically since it was introduced in the United States in the mid-1990s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pesticide National Synthesis Project.
The Center has won an award for “Best Use of Multimedia” for their story which included this graphic showing how the use of imidacloprid, a synthetic insecticide, has increased dramatically since it was introduced in the United States in the mid-1990s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pesticide National Synthesis Project. Haley Henschel / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Best Use of Multi-Platform Reporting: Bridgit Bowden reporting for WPR, along with Coburn Dukehart for the Center and artist Jacob Berchem for a story that revealed problems in the multibillion-dollar debt buying industry that targets poor borrowers. The package featured an online/print story, an audio report, photographs produced by Dukehart and illustrations by Berchem.

A collaborative story about the skyrocketing prices of prescription drugs won an award for “Best Investigative Story — Online.” Here, Jack Christensen, 8, who has Type 1 diabetes, has an after-school snack. Rapidly rising insulin costs have prompted his parents to push for lower drug prices.

Best Investigative Story — Online: This collaborative story about the skyrocketing prices of prescription drugs was reported by Sean Kirkby of Wisconsin Health News, Bridgit Bowden for WPR and Dee J. Hall for the Center along with data analysis by the Center’s Cara Lombardo and Andrew Hahn and photographs by the Center’s Coburn Dukehart. The story featured an audio report and an exclusive analysis that showed prices for some drugs had spiked by more than 5,000 percent, harming patients, boosting state and federal government spending on health care and threatening the ability free clinics to care for the uninsured.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

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