Tim Martinez, 58, a lifelong Milwaukee resident and hairdresser, was reading the food section at a downtown Starbucks on a recent weekday. Walk around downtown on a weekday and you’ll lose count of people toting a print copy. Whatever the reason, the paper is ubiquitous in Milwaukee. “For men, investigative journalism was the No. 1 reason women in its market read the paper is for investigative journalism, according to a survey Stanley says the paper conducted last year. The Journal Sentinel also found that the No. “Not only was it not the top reason for reading the paper, but it didn’t even come up!” “In some of the places they had been, that reason was not even on the list,” Stanley said. Managing editor George Stanley said that reader surveys have shown that people read the paper because they have “a desire to be good citizens.” The newspaper’s pollster told Stanley that civic engagement isn’t always a priority for newspaper readers. It’s easy to fall back on Midwestern stereotypes - nice, earnest, civic-minded - but there’s some truth in them. Milwaukee is not an average newspaper town. The Journal Sentinel’s story begins with its location. If we could stay at this level of staffing and keep adding to the core of younger people, that’s a great recipe.” We have a really solid core of people who can do this level of investigative reporting. But it just feels like, over the last year or so, things have stabilized. So I don’t want to minimize how many people we lost. You wonder how you’re going to recover from that. “Several years ago, we lost 100 people or something in one buyout,” said Umhoefer, in his 29th year at the paper. “At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, it really feels like we are actually moving toward something new and exciting,” said Dave Umhoefer, an investigative local government reporter who won one of those Pulitzers in 2008. That’s a tally newspapers a lot larger than the Journal Sentinel can only envy. Since 2008 - over what has been the most crushing stretch in American newspaper history - the paper has won three Pulitzers and been finalists three other times. Journalistically, the Journal Sentinel is in a period of real strength. And there’s a common thread between those two facts: Through all the financial stress, the paper has maintained - even extended - its commitment to watchdog, investigative reporting. Out in the community, the newspaper has maintained one of the nation’s highest rates of market penetration. The staff is smaller, as it is almost everywhere.īut spend time talking to people in the newsroom and you’ll find morale is unusually high. There’s been plenty of pain along the way: layoffs, buyouts, wage freezes, and advertising declines. The daily newspaper is actually…kind of…almost… thriving. But in the past decade, they’ve suffered the steepest declines, the biggest cutbacks, the worst losses.īut something’s different in Milwaukee. Before the web, metros occupied the business’ sweet spot: big newsrooms, a captive audience, and riches flowing in from the classifieds. In other cities, this might feel like a tidy metaphor for the plight of the newspaper industry - particularly the metro dailies. He instead suggests The Onion, print copies of which are just outside in a rusting metal box. Ask for a copy of the local daily and you get an apologetic chuckle from the clerk. MILWAUKEE - You won’t find any newspapers for sale at the fluorescent-lit convenience store about two blocks from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s downtown headquarters. We thought it would be a good time to look in on Lucius Nieman’s old daily - now known, after a consolidation of morning and afternoon papers, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
This weekend, the foundation is celebrating its 75th anniversary. In her will, Agnes Wahl Nieman left a large part of her estate - which had been built by the Journal’s success - to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism and educate persons deemed especially qualified for journalism.” That gift led to the Nieman Fellowships and the Nieman Foundation, of which Nieman Lab is a part. He died in 1935 the next year, so did his wife. Editor’s note: In 1882, not long before his 25th birthday, a Wisconsin newspaperman named Lucius Nieman gave his new paper, The Milwaukee Journal, a mission: “The Journal will be the outspoken, independent organ of the people against all that is wrong or unworthy of support in public men and the legislation of the State and nation.” Over the following half-century, he built the Journal into a nationally noted, Pulitzer-winning powerhouse.
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