A decade ago, Thomas Murphy was a college dropout who used alcohol and drugs to deal with undiagnosed depression. Therapy made the difference for him. But he can’t receive it at school. When he re-enrolled at UW-Madison and went to the counseling center, he walked out with no appointment and a list of referrals.

Murphy’s story underscores a national dilemma: a surge in students seeking intensive counseling and psychiatric care, which college mental health centers often lack resources to provide.

It’s difficult to write about the levels of money now being pumped into Wisconsin’s electoral process without using terms like “jaw-dropping” and “eye-popping.” It’s a wonder we can still recognize ourselves in the mirror, with all these contortions.

Weekly commentary from Bill Lueders, Money & Politics Project director.

There’s a new wrinkle in Wisconsin’s fast-growing frac sand mining: It turns out that an endangered butterfly, the Karner blue, lives in the same region. And some companies may be failing to check for the butterfly as they move ahead with mining operations.

Dick Wheeler, the late founder of the Wheeler Report, has been named the 2012 recipient of the Distinguished Wisconsin Watchdog Award in recognition of his four decades of tirelessly opening Wisconsin state government to public scrutiny.

The award is part of the second annual Wisconsin Watchdog Awards reception and dinner, presented jointly on Wednesday, April 25, by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council and the Madison Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

It makes sense to study contributions in search of larger patterns. So MapLight, a national nonpartisan research organization, recently launched a new feature that tracks campaign contributions by company for the U.S. Congress and two state legislatures, in California and Wisconsin.

Walt Bogdanich, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate, will deliver the keynote address at the second annual Wisconsin Watchdog Awards on April 25.

The nonprofit and nonpartisan Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is hiring two summer reporting interns.
Eligibility is limited to undergraduate and graduate students who are enrolled, at the time of application, in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where the Center is based.

The internships will begin in June and end in August. [...]