Courtesy of Wausau Pilot & Revie
Shereen Siewert, left, with husband, Darren, was the only staffer at the Wausau Pilot & Review when she earned three first-place honors in the 2018 Wisconsin Newspaper Association contest.
Before everybody was doing it, Shereen Siewert worked from home. It was not until her kids got older that she would follow her “dreams” and get a bachelor’s degree in journalism. From there she landed a job as a reporter with the Wausau Daily Herald. It was 2012 and she was 43 at the time. “I got into journalism a little later in life,” she says.
She was a cops reporter for a couple of years and then joined the investigative team of USA TODAY Wisconsin. She loved the work in both positions but it was a time of massive downsizing and paper closures throughout the industry, including at Gannett, which owned her newspaper. “Those that didn’t close reduced staff and coverage considerably and I found that to be a huge concern,” she says. That was partly because she was older and partly because she wasn’t interested in relocating. “Wausau is my community,” she says. “I’m not a 25-year-old journalist looking to move to California or Texas.”
She then spent a little over a year as the news editor for the local alt-weekly, Wausau City Pages, but was yearning to do more heavy-hitting journalism. Her husband encouraged her to start her own news organization. “Initially,” she says, “it sounded like a pipe dream.” But she started doing research and within a few months obtained 501(c)(3) nonprofit status for the Wausau Pilot & Review, joining a growing list of news outlets (like Isthmus) that saw a more sustainable future by being able to draw on reader and foundation support. Meanwhile she was building the website from scratch and with some start-up funding from a foundation was able to launch the online news site in February 2017.
She was the only staffer at the time and thought if the website could draw 3,000 readers a day her scheme could work. The response exceeded her expectations. The site now gets an average 30,000-40,000 readers a day and the newsroom’s newsletter list has 36,000 subscribers.
The news site covers city and county government, the school board and local events and has since its founding earned 10 state and national awards for its coverage. The staff now includes her husband, who left his nursing job to work at the Pilot full-time, another full-time reporter, a person who does marketing and sales, and a part-time editorial assistant. A freelance sports reporter covers local and high school contests.
Everything was going pretty well until October 2021, when Waukesha-based attorney Matthew M. Fernholz sent a letter to the news site demanding an apology, retraction, and $200,000 for client Cory Tomczyk for a story the Pilot ran reporting that Tomczyk was overheard calling a 13-year-old a homophobic slur during a Marathon County board meeting on Aug. 12, 2021. It was a contentious meeting, with a resolution to promote diversity and inclusion on the agenda. The Pilot retained attorneys at Godfrey & Kahn to represent them and Tomczyk filed a defamation lawsuit against the news site.
Siewert says her legal bills now approach $200,000. In mid-August the New York Times wrote a story about the legal battle headlined: “Report on Anti-Gay Slur Could Put Local News Site Out of Business: When a north-central Wisconsin news site reported that a businessman had uttered a homophobic slur, he sued, claiming defamation. The legal bills are piling up.”
Tomczyk, now a Republican state senator from Mosinee, denies that he made the comment despite several witnesses who have offered sworn depositions. He did not return either a phone call or email for comment.
On April 28, 2023, Marathon County Circuit Court Judge Scott Corbett dismissed the lawsuit, finding that Tomczyk was a public figure and that the Pilot had not acted with “malice” in its reporting. The requirement to find malice in a defamation action, the judge wrote, “arises from the constitutional protections for freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
Siewert says she was greatly relieved at the judge’s ruling. But two weeks later Tomczyk appealed the decision.
The past two years have been the most stressful of her life, says Siewert, in part due to the lawsuit but also to the loss of her stepfather from COVID and sister from cancer. She also cares for her mother, who has dementia. “All these personal things are difficult enough, but adding to it the very real threat of losing everything I own and everything I have worked so hard to achieve nearly destroyed me.”
Like many small news outfits, Siewert did not have media liability insurance when the Pilot was sued. She tried to secure some early on, but it’s expensive and can be hard to find. She now has coverage through a provider who works with LION Publishers (Local Independent Online News).
She says she pays her legal bills when she can and her lawyers have been patient and told her not to worry. A Go Fund Me site, established the day the New York Times article was published, has, as of press time, raised $112,475 of the $150,000 goal. Some attorneys are also now offering pro bono help.
Tomczyk’s action against the Pilot has raised awareness that Wisconsin, unlike some other 30 states, does not have a law protecting news media, journalists and activists from frivolous lawsuits aimed at silencing them. On Aug. 23, state Sen. Melissa Agard and state Rep. Jimmy Anderson, both Democrats, introduced "anti-SLAPP" legislation.
“SLAPP lawsuits are a weapon used by the powerful and well-connected in an attempt to intimidate or censor critics, activists, journalists and others with a stifling financial burden,” Agard said in a news release. “It is shameful that my Republican colleague, state Sen. Cory Tomczyk, has chosen to rely on this strategy in order to silence a local newspaper that reported his homophobic and inappropriate actions.”
Under the bill, the person sued can file a special motion to strike the case because it involves speech on a matter of public concern. If successful, under most circumstances, the defendant is entitled to recover attorney fees and costs.
Siewert says the Pilot did its due diligence before naming Tomczyk as the source of the slur and is “100 percent confident in our reporting.” She rejects any suggestion that this is some kind of partisan issue. “It’s not,” she says. “It doesn’t matter, Republican or Democrat, this is an issue about truth and about being able to tell the truth without putting your livelihood on the line with every word you write.”
Journalists, she adds, don’t want to err in their reporting. “We have every motivation to be on point, and to make sure that we are telling the truth.”
She says that people sometimes forget that journalists are human beings who take great care and pride in their work. “The hate mail I receive from people in my own community would shock just about anyone.”
She does her best to put the hate aside, and focus instead on the “people across the globe who understand how crucial local journalism is and who understand the difficulties involved in this fight.
“We still have a long way to go here, but for the first time I am not waking up in a cold sweat during the night worried about the financial implications of this.”
[Editor's note: This article was corrected to note that it was Siewert's stepfather who died from COVID, not her father-in-law. ]
