The Halls of justice

Getting right down to business, Dee Hall takes the lid off a plastic tray and says that everybody, including the Isthmus reporter observing this staff meeting of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, had better take some cheese and crackers.

“And it’s not payola,” she says, referring to the shady act of greasing a reporter’s palms in expectation of favorable coverage. “You’re going to write what you’re going to write.”

It’s a wisecrack worthy of a true muckraker. For nearly 40 years, Dee has been a working reporter alongside her longtime colleague, business partner and husband, Andy. So, even when Dee’s divvying up snacks — she reportedly keeps everybody in the office well-fed — her mind isn’t far from subjects like the ethical standards of journalism.

Andy, the center’s executive director, tells Isthmus that there’s hardly a distinction between their professional and personal lives.

“These are not jobs, it’s a lifestyle,” he says. “It’s six or seven days a week, 12 hours or more per day. There’s a relentless workload. The pace, the volume — it’s enormous.”

The WCIJ is an all-consuming endeavor for the Halls. With the dogged determination of lifelong reporters and their small but dedicated staff, they are working, sometimes literally around the clock, to strengthen in-depth reporting in Wisconsin and beyond. Since launching the center in 2009, they have transformed it from a bare-bones, basement-dwelling startup based on an unproven model to a local media fixture with a national audience of millions.

The WCIJ is an example of how in-depth journalism is evolving — how it must evolve — and a beacon of hope in the war-torn landscape of modern media.

Lauren Fuhrmann, the center’s associate director, puts it succinctly: “The greatest challenge facing journalism right now is not having one more investigative reporter, but figuring out how we sustain it for the long term.”

At a time when many newspapers are folding or fighting off hostile takeover bids from conglomerates, the WCIJ operates free from the traditional, ad-based paradigm. The center has 501(c)(3) nonprofit status and relies primarily on grants, philanthropic donations and fundraising to pay its staff. Though it frequently joins forces with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, it is an independent organization that allows other media outlets to distribute its stories for free.

The concept may be familiar now, but it wasn’t in 2009. At the time, there were a couple of national examples — the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica — but the Halls were among the first journalists in the nation to create a regional investigative center based on a nonprofit model, and the idea has caught fire.

The Institute for Nonprofit News had 27 member organizations when it was founded in 2009 and has since grown to include more than 200 newsrooms throughout North America.

However, it’s not a magic formula, says Rick Edmonds, a business analyst for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida. Plenty of fledgling nonprofit news organizations have proven unsustainable despite initially producing solid journalism.

“Having some money as startup capital is important because you’ve got to get out there, find an audience and pay reporters before you’re going to get much of any revenue,” he says. From his vantage, the nonprofit news model is filling some gaps in coverage, but “it’s not really close yet to making up for the jobs that have continued to fall away due to the financial pressure on newspapers.”

The WCIJ specializes in longform, in-depth stories that local news organizations probably don’t have the resources to cover. That’s a major reason why the Halls decided that a for-profit model probably wouldn’t work in Wisconsin.

“The smaller papers were not able to spend the time doing investigative journalism because they didn’t have the money to pay their regular staffers, much less extra staff,” Dee says. “They’re not going to pay a bunch of money — to us, or anyone — if they can’t afford their own reporters. We knew that going in.”

The Halls have seen firsthand the effects of the shrinking journalism industry — colleagues getting laid off, taking buyouts, or changing careers due to stagnant wages and little job security. The loss of personnel is particularly troubling at the local level, because reporters from a major regional paper like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel aren’t going to cover a plan commission meeting in, say, Oshkosh.

“The idea used to be that maybe citizens would go out and gather their own news, or whatever,” Dee says. “Nah. They’ll do it once. They’ll go to one planning meeting that has something to do with their neighborhood, and they’re going to sit there for six hours, wanting to poke their eyes out with sharp sticks.

“What you need are people who are paid to do that, who don’t have a conflict of interest, to represent the public in those meetings.”

The Monday morning editorial meeting kicks off with a business update from Andy. He has an open-book policy on the WCIJ’s financial operations, partly to avoid the perception of donors influencing the center’s reporting, but also because he expects that same level of transparency from public officials and institutions when the WCIJ submits public records requests.

Andy fills in everybody on upcoming grant opportunities, pursuing potential donors, expanding the center’s presence in Milwaukee, and the center’s goal of growing its annual budget from about $700,000 to $1 million.

“This is not stuff I learned in journalism school,” says Andy, who long ago took “reporter” off his business card.

Then the editorial staff goes round the table, telling each other about their in-depth reporting projects in various stages of completion. There's Sarah Whites-Koditschek, a reporter with Wisconsin Public Radio embedded in the WCIJ newsroom through an annual fellowship, discussing her work on the local wind-energy industry. There's Emily Hamer, a recent UW-Madison graduate and an intern at the WCIJ, talking about her interviews with politically apathetic college students who choose not to vote.

And there’s Coburn Dukehart, a former photo editor with National Public Radio and National Geographic, who serves as the center’s digital and multimedia director. She’s responsible for the WCIJ’s visual storytelling, and at this meeting she’s concerned with who needs to take the office camera out on assignment. Resources are limited.

The WCIJ is an atypical newsroom in that it doesn’t have a dedicated staff reporter (although it’s about to start a national search for a senior editor/reporter). It relies on interns, fellows and freelancers to do most of the news gathering. “We have a really high bar,” Fuhrmann says of the interns. “A lot goes into training them, and they’re a huge part of the organization.”

So are Dee’s journalism students at UW-Madison. This semester, her 400-level investigative reporting class is putting together a package of stories on legalizing cannabis in Wisconsin. At the end of the semester, the results of the class investigation — 12 total stories, all with multimedia elements — will be published on the center’s website and distributed to local and national news outlets. The center publishes 20 to 30 major reports a year, or roughly one every two weeks.

The staff agrees the cannabis stories need more “real people,” though — not public officials or advocates, just locals who are willing to talk about using. Thankfully, Natalie Yahr, the center’s public engagement and marketing intern, put out a call for interviewees on social media and it’s already getting a strong response. Dee is awed by this display of “young-people social media wizardry.”

“I am a collection of certain skills, most of them old,” she tells Isthmus. “Other people are a collection of new skills, but they don’t have the experience. So, we try to leverage what people are good at.”

They’re also, like, super on top of tracking stories once they’re published. According to Fuhrmann, since launching in July 2009, the WCIJ has produced more than 350 major news reports that have been cited or picked up by more than 800 newspapers, websites and TV and radio stations. The center saw a big surge in total audience last year due to a new partnership with the Associated Press, reaching digital and print audiences of 12 million and 6.7 million, respectively.

That’s major exposure for a young journalist right out of college like Hamer. “I was updating my resume last weekend, and my stories have been picked up 139 times,” she says. “They reached an estimated audience of 800,000, which is just crazy.”

A core tenet of the WCIJ is “training the next generation of investigative journalists,” as Andy often likes to say. Dee’s classes at UW-Madison funnel talented young journalists to the center for internships, or just general advice.

Dee and Andy also travel around the state for speaking engagements to promote media literacy, because much of the public fundamentally misunderstands how journalism works. For example, a recent poll conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review found that 60 percent of Americans believe reporters get paid by their sources “sometimes or very often.”

“That shows us we have a long way to go to educate people about what we do, how we do it, and what ethical bumpers guide our work,” Dee says. “It’s really nothing like what they might imagine, or what they’ve been told by a news outlet or a political campaign trying to smear journalism.”

Dee says the WCIJ, which is nonpartisan, strives to present accurate information in a fair context.

“Not only do we check every fact, but we look at the import, the context, the tone of the story,” she says. “Is it really fair, based on the information we know? So, it’s the opposite of sensationalism.”

After a few of the center’s first stories were published containing errors, Furhmann says, “they had a come-to-Jesus moment, a meeting with the whole staff.”

They’ve since adhered to a system based on the Center for Public Integrity’s fact-checking guidelines. Every factual statement in the story is numbered and tied to a printed document. Reporters can spend weeks vetting their own stories.

“I always dreaded fact-checking, but I felt so much better afterward,” says Fuhrmann, who started with the center as a reporter. “I would be able to sleep the night before the story came out.”

Not everyone has been pleased with the WCIJ’s work over the years. In June 2013, the GOP-controlled state Legislature’s budget-writing committee approved a measure that would have evicted the WCIJ from its campus offices and forbidden university employees from working with the center. Dee and Andy were blindsided.

The ensuing month-long battle to stay on campus ended when Gov. Scott Walker vetoed the provision. Fuhrmann says it’s unlikely they’ll ever know who exactly wanted to evict them, but the saga ended up drawing more attention to the WCIJ than ever.

“A lot of people found out about us through that,” she says.

Angry politicians failed to move the WCIJ, but faulty plumbing succeeded. Over the first weekend in February, the center’s office in UW-Madison’s Vilas Communication Hall was flooded due to a burst pipe on the next floor up, damaging several computer monitors and destroying their couch — “our only nice piece of furniture,” Andy says. The center has since moved into a heavily postered office shared with WSUM 91.7 FM, on the fifth floor of UW-Madison’s Student Activity Center. They hope to move back into Vilas Hall over the summer.

For several days after the flooding, the center’s staff worked from Dee and Andy’s house. In a testament to the personal manner in which the Halls run the WCIJ, it was an easy arrangement.

“For whatever reason, that didn’t feel weird,” Hamer says. “It’s very much like a parental sort of thing. This organization is like their baby, so it has a more personal vibe. They’re very close with the staff, and when you’re in that environment you become close with them, too.”

Dee is a morning person; Andy is a night owl. It’s typical to get emails from Andy at 2 or 3 a.m. And he’s the chatty one: His face, warm and congenial, lights up multiple times per interview because he’s absolutely delighted to be engaged in conversation. (He loved the personal communication aspects of being a reporter, but dreaded sitting down to write.) He’s also the more emotional of the two.

“When it came to their daughter getting married, Dee was like, ‘Yep, great. Here’s the wedding day,’” Fuhrmann says. “Andy was the one who was a pile of tears.”

Whereas Andy will linger over certain details in a story because he likes to talk things out with the reporter, Dee is, by all accounts, ruthlessly efficient during the editing process — and all other tasks.

“She is masterful,” Fuhrmann says, “a force of nature.”

Whites-Koditschek, who views her fellowship as an opportunity to take a deep dive into investigative work, has always wanted to work with an experienced editor like Dee.

“Dee is a sounding board for all sorts of questions,” she says. “I’ll ask her, ‘Is this story viable?’ or come to her with tricky situations where I’m not getting sources to respond. Sometimes I’ll even ask for more help than I need, just to see how she would handle it.”

Both in the newsroom and classroom, she is straightforward to the point of being blunt. If Hamer doesn’t like a particular edit Dee makes, she knows she’d better not be wishy-washy.

“It’s fine to challenge her, but you need to come up with a solution first,” she says. “You can’t say, ‘I don’t like this sentence, I’m not sure what the problem is.’ She’s already on to the next edit.”

Dee is approachable, but insanely busy as a rule. “If it feels like you’re interrupting something urgent, you probably are,” says former intern Cara Lombardo. Dee’s no-nonsense workplace demeanor helped Lombardo prepare her for her career as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

“For me, so much of learning how to be a journalist was taking criticism and incorporating it quickly,” she says.

During her internship at the center, Lombardo learned how to track down documents, ask enough questions to understand them, and write it all out “fairly, accurately and succinctly,” she says. “It was the type of very close, detail-oriented and personalized instruction that you can’t really get in school.”

Andy grew up in a rural setting on the Ohio River in southern Indiana, and in an idealistic household. The local newspaper editor was a revered figure in his family, and an early memory of his mother’s quest to sunshine records from the local school district proved influential.

“I still remember her on the phone, haranguing the superintendent and other officials about these expenditures,” he says, “and this sense of outrage that resources had been wasted, that something had been done improperly.”

But his first steps as a journalist were wobbly. He attended a two-week journalism institute at Indiana University as a high school student, and when his mother asked him how it was going after the first week, he started to cry because he was so overwhelmed.

“I didn’t know how to type, I didn’t know how to do an interview, I didn’t understand the proofreading marks,” he recalls. “It was a really tough experience.”

The second week of the course went much better, though. He found somebody to type his papers, started earning praise for his reports, and won a $400 scholarship to study journalism at Indiana University. It was enough to cover his first semester’s tuition. (His senior year in high school, he took a typing class so he could write his own reports.)

Dee, a grade back from Andy, attended the same journalism institute the next year, won the same scholarship, and entered the same journalism program at IU.

She was born in Beloit and grew up on the east side of Madison. The summer before her junior year, her father, who ran a paint store for Sherwin-Williams, got a big promotion and moved the family to Crown Point, Indiana. Inspired by the Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s reporting for The Washington Post on the Watergate scandal, Dee — a straight-A student — joined the student newspaper.

“I felt like it was such an important career,” she says.

Dee and Andy met at the Indiana Daily Student in 1979. Working up to 60 hours a week, almost all of their friendships were through work, and newsroom romances were commonplace. They were, in fact, dating each other’s roommates; Dee calls this “the ugly truth.”

There were clashes, too.

“I was not a good manager, as a college editor,” Andy says. “I pushed people too hard, I was impatient.”

“You were micromanaging,” Dee adds. “Just throwing that in there.”

“I agree,” he says. “I’ve tried to learn from that experience.”

They didn’t start dating until after college, when they both worked at The Arizona Republic, a daily newspaper in Phoenix with the largest circulation in the state. Andy had interned there in the summer of 1980, and infiltrated the local Ku Klux Klan for an investigative project.

“That experience of being able to go inside an organization and expose its operations when they didn’t want the public to be aware of its work, that was really important,” he says.

“Andy had the advantage of being this southern boy who’s just come to town,” Dee says admiringly. “It wasn’t something that just anybody could have pulled off.”

They got married in 1988 and their first daughter, Molly, was born two years later. With their eyes on raising a family, Andy and Dee moved to Fitchburg in 1990 (their second daughter, Monica, was born in 1994). They were both hired at the Wisconsin State Journal and started a long run as a local journalism power couple, breaking major sports and political scandals. In 2006, Andy was reassigned to the education beat. No longer a full-time investigative reporter and nearly approaching 50 years old, he had reached a crossroads.

“It made me think about how fragile and short life is,” he says, “and how important it is, if something matters, to do it now rather than look back later and think, ‘Why didn’t I try that?’”

In January 2009, Andy took a buyout from the State Journal and launched the WCIJ in a 120-square-foot basement office in the UW-Madison journalism school. Dee stayed on at the State Journal — with two kids in college, it was important for one of them to earn a steady paycheck — but left to become managing editor of the WCIJ in 2015.

In the beginning, he and Dee decided on three principles that guide them to this day: “Protect the vulnerable. Expose wrongdoing. Seek solutions.”

The intertwining careers of Dee and Andy Hall had been leading to this. Now, they’re 10 years into their greatest challenge — building and sustaining an investigative news nonprofit.

“It’s about turning the WCIJ from this feisty startup into an institution that will outlast all of us,” Andy says.

Dee nods and says, “That’s the goal.”