Julie Routhieaux, administrative specialist for the village of Little Chute, Wisconsin, left, and Patti Seeman, an election inspector, help out with voting at the village hall for a special election in the 1st Senate District on June 12, 2018. Democrat Caleb Frostman beat Republican Andre' Jacque for the state Senate seat. A judge had ordered Gov. Scott Walker to call a special election for the seat after the former office holder, Republican Frank Lasee, resigned in December to take a job with the state. Credit: Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Reading Time: 2minutes
Our newsletters:
A great way to stay informed without feeling overwhelmed. 👍
Local, independent, fact-based reporting is essential to vibrant communities and a healthy democracy. We’re rebuilding and reimagining the future of local news across Wisconsin.
(Narayan Mahon for Wisconsin Watch / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service)
Our mission
Using journalism to make the communities of Wisconsin strong, informed and connected.
Our impact
Our work helps people navigate their lives, be seen and heard, hold power to account and come together in community and civic life.
Our values
Our work is guided by these core values:
We are committed to service, prioritizing the needs of the communities we serve through relevant, empowering and civic-minded journalism.
Integrity drives us to report with truth, fairness and transparency, earning and maintaining public trust.
Through collaboration, we partner with organizations, residents and media outlets to amplify diverse voices and deepen our impact.
We act with initiative, identifying emerging issues and responding creatively to changing community needs.
We invest in growth by fostering a culture of learning, open communication and innovation to sustain our mission for future generations.
Who we are
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using journalism to make the communities of Wisconsin strong, informed and connected. As a nonprofit investigative news organization, we expose injustices, listen to the everyday problems in our communities and shine a light on issues that too often go unnoticed. Every story we publish is rigorously fact-checked to ensure accuracy, fairness and impact.
We don’t just report the news — we connect communities. By collaborating with news organizations across Wisconsin and beyond, we expand the reach of our reporting, ensuring critical stories reach the people who need them most. Our multimedia investigations appear on WisconsinWatch.org and are republished by hundreds of outlets statewide.
Wisconsin Watch is home to multiple newsrooms and teams that work together to strengthen local journalism and amplify underrepresented voices:
Our statewide newsroom uncovers systemic issues affecting communities across Wisconsin, putting local challenges into broader context.
That newsroom’s statehouse bureau covers state and local government, ensuring our readers understand how the decisions made in the capital impact communities across Wisconsin.
Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (NNS), an independent community-based newsroom in Milwaukee that delivers deeply rooted, community-driven reporting on issues that matter to Milwaukee’s central city and communities of color.
Our northeast Wisconsin bureau is built around community connection, accountability and public participation. Aside from publishing stories, it exists to build a conversation with the people who live and work in northeast Wisconsin.
By exposing the truth, we spark change that improves communities across Wisconsin.
How do you know you can trust our work?
It’s harder than ever to know which information to trust. The sheer volume of news, opinions and misinformation online can make it difficult to separate credible reporting from content that isn’t grounded in facts. We understand that skepticism, and we believe trust must be earned, not assumed.
At Wisconsin Watch, our reporting is built on a commitment to transparency, accuracy and the public interest. We’re part of a network of respected journalism organizations that hold us accountable to high standards:
We are a founding member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a community of nonprofit newsrooms dedicated to investigative reporting that serves the public.
We participate in the Trust Project, a global initiative that developed transparency standards — called Trust Indicators — to help you evaluate the credibility of our work and understand how our journalism is produced.
Through the CatchLight Local Visual Desk, we collaborate with other newsrooms to strengthen visual storytelling and make high-quality journalism more accessible.
As a member of Gigafact, we publish Fact Briefs that quickly and clearly respond to widely shared claims, helping set the record straight.
These partnerships don’t replace your judgment; they’re one way we show our work and invite scrutiny. We encourage you to explore our methods, review our sources when available and hold us accountable. Trust in journalism starts with openness, and we’re committed to providing it.
From now until Dec. 31, NewsMatch, a nationwide program to bolster grassroots funding of nonprofit journalism, will match your new monthly donation 12x or double your one-time gift, all up to $1,000.
Julie Routhieaux, administrative specialist for the village of Little Chute, Wisconsin, left, and Patti Seeman, an election inspector, help out with voting at the village hall for a special election in the 1st Senate District on June 12, 2018. Democrat Caleb Frostman beat Republican Andre’ Jacque for the state Senate seat. A judge had ordered Gov. Scott Walker to call a special election for the seat after the former office holder, Republican Frank Lasee, resigned in December to take a job with the state. Credit: Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Over the past decade, we have produced more than 350 major reports that have been picked up by more than 750 news organizations nationwide (yes, we give our stories away for free) while teaching the next generation.
Your investment in the Center will continue to pay dividends for decades. After they leave our offices on the University of Madison-Wisconsin campus, our interns and fellows (41 and counting) move on to jobs in journalism and other fields, where they put the skills they learned at the Center to use by holding the powerful to account, creating innovative ways of engaging with the public and sustaining high-quality journalism, and strengthening our democracy.
As a nonprofit newsroom, we prioritize truth over profits. Your support today will go a long way toward keeping this award-winning work going.
These stories need to be told and will be — thanks to people like you who care about Wisconsin, our quality of life and our democracy.
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.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Scroll down to copy and paste the code of our article into your CMS. The codes for images, graphics and other embeddable elements may not transfer exactly as they appear on our site.
*** Also, the code below will NOT copy the featured image on the page. You are welcome to download the main image as a separate element for publication with this story. ***
You are welcome to republish our articles for free using the following ground rules.
Credit should be given, in this format: “By Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch”
Editing material is prohibited, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and in-house style (for example, using “Waunakee, Wis.” instead of “Waunakee” or changing “yesterday” to “last week”)
Other than minor cosmetic and font changes, you may not change the structural appearance or visual format of a story.
If published online, you must include the links and link to wisconsinwatch.org
If you share the story on social media, please mention @wisconsinwatch (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), and ensure that the original featured image associated with the story is visible on the social media post.
Don’t sell the story or any part of it — it may not be marketed as a product.
Don’t extract, store or resell Wisconsin Watch content as a database.
Don’t sell ads against the story. But you can publish it with pre-sold ads.
Your website must include a prominent way to contact you.
Additional elements that are packaged with our story must be labeled.
Users can republish our photos, illustrations, graphics and multimedia elements ONLY with stories with which they originally appeared. You may not separate multimedia elements for standalone use.
If we send you a request to change or remove Wisconsin Watch content from your site, you must agree to do so immediately.
For questions regarding republishing rules please contact Jeff Bauer, digital editor and producer, at jbauer@wisconsinwatch.org
Donate this #GivingTuesday to support Wisconsin investigative reporting and democracy
by Andy Hall / Wisconsin Watch, Wisconsin Watch November 27, 2018
Andy Hall, a co-founder of Wisconsin Watch and a former Investigative Reporters and Editors board member, won dozens of awards for his reporting in 26 years at the Wisconsin State Journal and The Arizona Republic. Since the Wisconsin Watch's launch in 2009, he has been responsible for the journalistic and financial operations.
Hall began his career in 1982 as a copyboy at The New York Times. At The Republic, Hall helped break the “Keating Five” scandal involving Sen. John McCain. At the State Journal, Hall’s stories held government and the powerful accountable and protected the vulnerable through coverage that addressed the racial achievement gap in public schools and helped spark the creation of the nationally noted Schools of Hope volunteer tutoring program, revealed NCAA violations by University of Wisconsin athletes, and exposed appalling conditions in neglected neighborhoods such as Allied Drive and Worthington Park. Hall won a first-place award in 2008 for beat reporting from the Education Writers Association. He also has received National Headliner, Gerald Loeb, James K. Batten and Inland Press Association awards for investigative, financial, deadline and civic journalism coverage. Hall has served as a mentor to the staff of La Comunidad, a Spanish-language newspaper in Madison, and has taught numerous courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication. He serves on the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council Board of Directors, Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism Board of Directors, and Indiana University Media School’s Journalism Alumni Board, of which he is president. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University and, in 2016, received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the IU Media School. He also serves as a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News membership task force to create and uphold high industry standards.
