If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the firehose of news stories documenting Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, I don’t blame you. I feel the same way, even though it’s my job to stay plugged in.
Whether you love or loathe the sweeping change in Washington, this much is clear: It will deeply affect the lives of Wisconsin residents. For many people, that’s already begun — whether they rely on a canceled contract, lost their federal job or face a service disruption.
The sheer volume of consequential storylines worth exploring could paralyze journalists, tempting them to spend more time reacting to officials than listening to the public’s information needs.
As Wisconsin Watch considers how best to keep communities connected and informed, we’re trying to stick to our strengths. Among them:
Bottom-up reporting that prioritizes your questions and tips — like Phoebe Petrovic’s story on disrupted transgender care services at Children’s Wisconsin hospital in Milwaukee, or Addie Costello’s ongoing coverage of what potential cuts to Medicaid funding mean for residents. (Watch for more localized Medicaid stories in the coming weeks.)
Collaboration — because no newsroom can cover everything alone. Wisconsin Watch distributes our reporting for free and often teams up with other newsrooms on big stories. But we also strive to amplify the stellar work of our partners. That means rounding up top headlines in our Wisconsin Weekly newsletter or republishing stories from other partners that generously share their work, such as WPR, Floodlight, ProPublica and the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. We also use our Associated Press subscription to bring you some of the biggest stories of the day, unobscured by paywalls.
As we forge ahead into an unpredictable future, we hope to hear from you. Please keep sending us your tips, questions and feedback. We’ll do our best to respond to the moment.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
How we’re covering federal upheaval is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Shereen Siewert, publisher of the Wausau Pilot and Review, has been breathing easier these days. In September, a Wisconsin appeals court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of state Sen. Cory Tomczyk’s defamation lawsuit against Siewert, the nonprofit newsroom she founded in 2017 and one of its reporters.
The ruling, which Tomczyk did not appeal, ended a three-year legal nightmare that began after the Pilot and Review reported that Tomczyk, before joining the Legislature, “was widely overheard” calling a 13-year-old boy a “fag” at a Marathon County board meeting about a surprisingly contentious resolution affirming community inclusivity. Tomczyk denied using the slur and accused the news outlet of having “smeared” his reputation.
Although the Pilot and Review prevailed, the lawsuit took a severe financial and emotional toll, including some $200,000 in legal bills, lost donors and sponsors and the trauma of fearing bankruptcy while Siewert was caring for her dying sister and mother.
“I had serious conversations with my son about selling him my home if I couldn’t pay my legal bills,” says Siewert, noting that she was personally named in the suit. “I woke up in a panic thinking — I’m 56 years old and am about to lose everything.”
Jim Malewitz
The case drives home the need for what are sometimes called anti-SLAPP laws; the acronym stands for strategic lawsuits against public participation. While 34 states and the District of Columbia have enacted such laws to protect media and individuals from frivolous defamation lawsuits, Wisconsin has not.
“We are starkly aware that any reporter and any news organization in Wisconsin can be sued at any time for anything,” Siewert says. “Every time we write a story, we’re putting our livelihood on the line.”
Bills introduced last year by Democrats would have allowed Wisconsin judges to quickly dismiss SLAPP suits and require plaintiffs to pay the defendants’ legal fees. The state’s GOP-controlled Legislature did not even give them a hearing. But 2025 offers lawmakers a fresh opportunity to pass anti-SLAPP legislation.
Under the current standard set for defamation of public figures, a news outlet must show “actual malice” in publishing the information in question — either knowing it to be false or with “reckless disregard” as to its veracity. The Pilot and Review argued, and both a trial court judge and three-member appeals court panel unanimously agreed, that Tomczyk, as a local businessman who publicly opposed a resolution to declare Wausau a “Community for All,” qualified as a public figure and had failed to prove “actual malice.”
Indeed, the record showed that the Pilot and Review took appropriate steps to affirm the accuracy of its reporting. Three people swore they heard him use the slur, which he acknowledged using on other occasions. (Tomczyk did not respond to requests for comment for this column.)
The two lead Democrats behind last year’s anti-SLAPP bills — Sen. Melissa Agard of Madison and Rep. Jimmy Anderson of Fitchburg — aren’t returning this session.
But Rep. Alex Joers, D-Middleton, expects his colleagues will revive the legislation in 2025 and hopes slimmer partisan margins will encourage more compromise than in the past. The Assembly’s unanimous passage last year of a bill to protect student media from censorship showed Republicans and Democrats can find common ground on press protections. (The bill, however, died in the Senate.)
The benefits of an anti-SLAPP law would extend beyond newsrooms. Joers, who worked for Agard before joining the Legislature, recalled Agard researching the issue after learning that companies were suing people who left negative reviews on Yelp. Anti-SLAPP laws in other states — including Republican-led Texas and Tennessee — have protected residents from expensive lawsuits.
“This could happen to anybody,” Joers said.
It should happen to no one.
Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a group dedicated to open government. Council member Jim Malewitz is managing editor of Wisconsin Watch.
In an era of endless social media feeds, push alerts and newsletters competing for your attention, we appreciate the time you spend with our reporting.
We work hard to produce stories with a long shelf life — those with actionable information that make you think for weeks or months after reading them. That’s why we get excited when we learn that particular stories are resonating.
As we look back on 2024, we’re highlighting the stories that seemed to most interest you, at least according to the time readers on average spent on their web pages. If you missed them earlier, perhaps that’s enough endorsement to give them a read.
If you have feedback on our work, we always want to hear it. Let us know how by emailing me at jmalewitz@wisconsinwatch.org.
For nearly five years, residents and property owners in the northwest Wisconsin town of Trade Lake have clashed with a developer of a proposed $20 million pig farm. The swine breeding operation, known as Cumberland LLC, would be the state’s largest. Locals have found little comfort in answers to their questions about how the farm would impact their quality of life. (Andrew Mulhearn for Wisconsin Watch)
We published this story at the end of 2023, but folks were reading it well into 2024 and devoting more time on average than they did for any other story this year.
Reporter Bennet Goldstein illustrated how a pig farm developer failed to earn the trust of Trade Lake, Wisconsin, residents as the community learned of their vulnerability to potential environmental harms from agricultural operations. This was part of the three-part series Hogtied, which examined the political, regulatory and economic forces shaping a proposal to build Wisconsin’s largest pig farm.
ProPublica Local Reporting Network investigative reporter Phoebe Petrovic told the story of how a Waukesha County anti-abortion extremist went from political pariah to ideological influencer. Matthew Trewhella regained favor among some Republicans by exhorting local government officials to reject state and federal laws that don’t conform with God’s laws based on an obscure 16th-century theory known as “the doctrine of the lesser magistrates.”
Wisconsin Watch’s Mario Koran, in collaboration with The New York Times, investigated the checkered disciplinary records of Wisconsin prison doctors.
He found that nearly a third of the 60 staff physicians employed over the last decade were censured by a state medical board for an error or breach of ethics. Many doctors went on to face lawsuits from inmates saying that they made errors that led to serious harm, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts. Many of the physicians would likely struggle to get hired at hospitals and in other settings because of those histories, a former state Medical Examining Board chairman told Koran.
Left to right: Michelle Bryant, WNOV; Pat Kreitlow, Civic Media; Rob Ferrett, WPR; Steve Scaffidi, WTMJ; Dan O’Donnell, WISN; Vicki McKenna, WIBA (Madeline Vogt for Wisconsin Watch)
This was part of a six-part series, Change is on the Air, produced by Wisconsin Watch and investigative journalism students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about the changing state of talk radio in Wisconsin.
In fact-checking six radio hosts across the political spectrum, the students found a disturbing reality that spoke to our current political moment: The shows spreading the most misinformation had the largest audience and most advertising. Readers also spent more time on the page of the series overview story than most other 2024 stories.
In his final story for Wisconsin Watch as a Report for America fellow, Jacob Resneck dug into the disturbing rise in police-involved deaths in Wisconsin over the past two years. The attorney general and the largest police union said the increase was due to more incidents involving armed and dangerous individuals. That’s despite the fact that violent crime is down, and such incidents make up a smaller share of incidents here than in neighboring states. Wisconsin at the time saw more fatal encounters than Illinois, despite having only half the population.
The Social Development Commission’s main office sits empty in Milwaukee on the evening of June 28, 2024. The long-troubled agency in April abruptly shut down and laid off its entire staff, creating new holes in Milwaukee’s safety net. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Addie Costello of Wisconsin Watch and WPR traced the backstory of what happened to Milwaukee’s Social Development Commission, which shuttered and laid off its entire staff in April. State and local agencies awarded the intergovernmental commission big contracts even after SDC eliminated internal auditing mechanisms. She found that SDC was created by governments but functioned outside of them. Government officials told her they largely focused on how SDC executes contracts with their individual offices — rather than broader operations issues.
Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service reporter Meredith Melland contributed reporting to the investigation. She has closely chronicled other twists and turns at SDC, which provided a range of services such as emergency furnace installation, tax support, career advancement, senior companionship and rent assistance for low-income Milwaukee residents.
Monica Lo, shown on Jan. 26, 2024, has spent the last six years as an advocate and program coordinator at The Women’s Community, Inc., a nonprofit based in Wausau, Wis. She helps survivors of domestic violence who face challenges similar to those she faced in a previous relationship. (Kara Counard for Wisconsin Watch)
Reporter Zhen Wang wrote about a group of Hmong women who are pushing back against attitudes that prevent women from reporting abuse and leaving violent relationships. That includes offering safe housing, counseling and more representation in mediation processes that typically precede a divorce sanctioned by Hmong leaders. The women are also speaking out in an ongoing debate about the role patriarchal attitudes play in shaping scenarios that can prove deadly.
Federal law bans nursing homes from ousting residents for reasons related to a Medicaid transition — if the facility accepted Medicaid when they moved in. That’s not the case for assisted living facilities. (Andrew Mulhearn for Wisconsin Watch)
Assisted living can offer residents more independence and a less institutionalized setting than in traditional nursing homes. But Addie Costello of Wisconsin Watch and WPR found that assisted living residents have fewer protections for residents transitioning to Medicaid. At least four Wisconsin assisted living facilities involuntarily discharged residents who required Medicaid assistance between 2022 and 2023.
Meanwhile, Medicaid reimbursements lag far behind the cost of care, prompting some facilities to refuse to accept anything but private pay.
Imagery collected by inexpensive satellites is ushering in an era of real-time monitoring of manure-spreading practices at big farms. Some environmental advocates want the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to utilize the technology. (Madeline Vogt for Wisconsin Watch)
Reporter Bennet Goldstein last year received a cryptic Excel spreadsheet through a public records request. Although he didn’t understand it at the time, the document contained a list of potential illegal manure spreading incidents that were noticed by satellites orbiting the Earth.
That information led to this engaging story on how Stanford University researchers have used aerial photographs — snapped by satellites — to teach computers to recognize winter spreading. This all matters because applying manure atop snow or frozen soil heightens the risk of runoff, which can contaminate water, spread pathogens, seed algae blooms and kill fish.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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