Greg Anderson
The Wisconsin Examiner staff, from left to right: reporters Isiah Holmes and Erik Gunn, Editor-in-Chief Ruth Conniff and Deputy Editor Melanie Conklin
On July 16, the Wisconsin Examiner launched with the goal of rigorously covering political issues affecting Wisconsin.
The outlet is the 11th state news outlet started by The Newsroom, a venture of the Hopewell Fund that aims to increase coverage of state governments.
“The focus is on state government, politics, policies and how they affect people,” says Melanie Conklin, the Examiner’s managing editor. “We really want to focus on how these things affect real people, for lack of a better phrase.”
The publication will send out email newsletters every weekday that will include a mix of investigative reporting and opinion columns, along with brief updates on issues that the outlet will be “relentlessly tracking.” The emails are free with sign-up. The stories can also be read at wisconsinexaminer.com.
There are other ventures focusing on Wisconsin’s government, notably Wispolitics.
“Wispolitics is for insiders. That is their market,” Conklin says. “I almost see us as the flipside of that.”
She says the publication will look at things from the perspective of the Wisconsinite who isn’t immersed in politics but “wants to know how politics are going to affect their lives.”
The outlet debuted July 16 with an article on what Wisconsin activists will do now that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it has no authority to restrict partisan gerrymandering; a look at Scott Walker’s career since losing the governor’s office last year; a piece on state school funding, and a report on how Wisconsin’s Republican Congressional officials have mostly stayed silent on President Trump’s racist comments about four U.S. representatives. There was also a column by Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, about ICE raids.
Ruth Conniff, former editor of The Progressive magazine (and an Isthmus columnist), is the publication’s editor-in-chief. Also on the staff are long-time political reporter Erik Gunn (also an Isthmus contributor) and Isiah Holmes, who has also written for Isthmus, will cover state politics from a Milwaukee perspective. Conklin is a former Isthmus reporter who went on to work as a spokesperson for Democratic politicians and has been the communications director for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
Other Newsroom affiliates have been set up in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The motivation behind The Newsroom is to bolster declining coverage of state government by traditional media. “While traditional news coverage of national politics has increased in recent years, state coverage continues to shrink — leaving a void that is too often filled by partisan or unreliable sources,” its website states. “A 2014 Pew Research Center study showed that less than a third of U.S. newspapers have reporters covering their statehouses, a number that has certainly decreased in the last five years.”
Chris Fitzsimon, director and publisher of The Newsroom, says that state governments often have the biggest impact over people’s lives, but their operations are often the least understood or publicized.
“It’s a function of the shrinking of traditional press corps,” he says. “And in some ways, a lot of people don’t understand the impact state government has, especially when presidential politics is so overwhelming and their local governments are so close to them.”
The goal isn’t to have a Newsroom outlet in every state, Fitzsimon says. “We’re going to methodically expand as we can and find good people like Ruth and Melanie in places where we can add to the existing journalism culture,” Fitzsimon says. “We’re by no means trying to replace anybody and certainly appreciate the people working hard who are still doing it.”
Wisconsin was selected for an outlet because The Newsroom tapped into talented people interested in doing the work, but also because “Wisconsin is a fascinating state. It has a complicated and interesting history and current political climate.”
Fitzsimon is confident that the Hopewell Fund is committed to seeing the venture succeed and adds that the group hopes to enlist local donors for support.
One way that the Examiner hopes to differentiate its reporting from other news outlets, Conklin says, is by countering a “false narrative” of a rural-urban divide.
She uses clean drinking water as an example — “it’s the same if you live in Milwaukee and are worried about lead pipes or if you live in the country next to a giant factory farm.”
[Editor's note: This article, which was originally posted on July 11, has been updated to include comments from Chris Fitzsimon, director and publisher of The Newsroom.]
