Center Digital and Multimedia Director Coburn Dukehart shoots photos for a story about a proposed Kohler company owned golf course at Kohler-Andrae State Park, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on Oct. 11, 2018. Here she photographs Mary Faydash, co-founder of Friends of the Black River Forest. Credit: Sarah Whites-Koditschek / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
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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.
At the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, truth is our ultimate goal. We are transparent with our subjects and readers, we rigorously fact-check all our information and we share our work with news media across the nation. We feel tremendous pressure to get every detail right.
Our commitment to ethics and accuracy doesn’t stop with our written journalism either, but also applies to our visual journalism, including our photos, video and data graphics. As a photojournalist, it’s my job to accurately record events as they happen, not alter situations, and present our visuals in an ethical way.
While I often find that photo subjects are tempted to “perform” for the camera, it’s my job to explain that journalists never set up scenes, no matter how small the detail that would be changed. We don’t move items out of the frame. We don’t ask people to pretend or act. We always get names and background information when we can. We always publish photos that are editorially accurate. We are true and fair in our captions, and yes, we fact-check those too.
The result is photojournalism that is honest, emotional and compelling, and which elevates our reporting and storytelling on the web and across the pages of our print partners nationwide. See some of our top photos of 2018 here.
Mia Sato records a Facebook live video at the Watchdog 101 Workshop, prior to the Wisconsin Watchdog Awards at the Madison Club, March 30, 2017. Credit: Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Since I started at the Center in 2016, I have brought a trained visual eye to all of the Center’s reports, using our cameras to elevate the storytelling with meaningful portraiture and documentary photojournalism. The result is story pages that are vibrant and rich in visual detail, with photos that complement the depth and breadth of our reporting. Our high quality photojournalism has also helped our stories land on front pages across the state and across websites nationwide.
Filmmaker Jim Cricchi films content for Los Lecheros during a people’s hearing at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis., held to lobby legislators to vote against Assembly Bill 190, on Sept. 27, 2017. Opponents argued the bill would encourage discrimination and racial profiling in the state and potentially separate Wisconsin families through deportation. Credit: Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
We also put our truth-telling to work in the award-winning documentary “Los Lecheros (Dairy Farmers)” that we co-produced last year with Twelve Letter Films. The film explores rising tensions over undocumented dairy workers since the election of President Donald Trump. We made sure that every scene was captured truthfully and presented accurately in context with the text and audio that accompanied it.
It is expensive to outfit a growing staff of visual journalists with cameras and lenses, travel around the state to document stories, and distribute the fact-checked work — but this is critical to our mission. Can you help us meet this need with a gift?
Between now and Dec. 31, NewsMatch will match your donation to the Center. NewsMatch is a national campaign to encourage grassroots support of the nonprofit news sector. Because the Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, all donations are tax-deductible to the full extent allowed by law. Please make a gift today and have it matched!
You can make a gift securely via credit card here or mail a check to Wisconsin Watch, P.O. Box 5079, Milwaukee, WI 53205.
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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Whether wielding pens or cameras, we stand for integrity, transparency and ethics in news gathering
by Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch, Wisconsin Watch December 20, 2018
Coburn Dukehart is an Associate Director at Wisconsin Watch. She joined the organization in 2015 as the Digital and Multimedia Director. She is currently head of product and audience, directs visual and digital strategy; creates visual content; manages digital assets and trains student and professional journalists. Dukehart previously was a senior photo editor at National Geographic, picture and multimedia editor at NPR, and a photo editor at USATODAY.com and washingtonpost.com. She has received numerous awards from the Milwaukee Press Club, National Press Photographers Association, Pictures of the Year International and the White House News Photographers Association.
