Reporting intern Riley Vetterkind interviews Chuck Ripp at Ripp's Dairy Valley farm in Dane County, Wisconsin on Sept 12, 2017. Vetterkind is now a reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal. Credit: Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Local, independent, fact-based reporting is essential to vibrant communities and a healthy democracy. We’re rebuilding and reimagining the future of local news across Wisconsin.
(Narayan Mahon for Wisconsin Watch / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service)
Our mission
Using journalism to make the communities of Wisconsin strong, informed and connected.
Our impact
Our work helps people navigate their lives, be seen and heard, hold power to account and come together in community and civic life.
Our values
Our work is guided by these core values:
We are committed to service, prioritizing the needs of the communities we serve through relevant, empowering and civic-minded journalism.
Integrity drives us to report with truth, fairness and transparency, earning and maintaining public trust.
Through collaboration, we partner with organizations, residents and media outlets to amplify diverse voices and deepen our impact.
We act with initiative, identifying emerging issues and responding creatively to changing community needs.
We invest in growth by fostering a culture of learning, open communication and innovation to sustain our mission for future generations.
Who we are
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using journalism to make the communities of Wisconsin strong, informed and connected. As a nonprofit investigative news organization, we expose injustices, listen to the everyday problems in our communities and shine a light on issues that too often go unnoticed. Every story we publish is rigorously fact-checked to ensure accuracy, fairness and impact.
We don’t just report the news — we connect communities. By collaborating with news organizations across Wisconsin and beyond, we expand the reach of our reporting, ensuring critical stories reach the people who need them most. Our multimedia investigations appear on WisconsinWatch.org and are republished by hundreds of outlets statewide.
Wisconsin Watch is home to multiple newsrooms and teams that work together to strengthen local journalism and amplify underrepresented voices:
Our statewide newsroom uncovers systemic issues affecting communities across Wisconsin, putting local challenges into broader context.
That newsroom’s statehouse bureau covers state and local government, ensuring our readers understand how the decisions made in the capital impact communities across Wisconsin.
Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (NNS), an independent community-based newsroom in Milwaukee that delivers deeply rooted, community-driven reporting on issues that matter to Milwaukee’s central city and communities of color.
Our northeast Wisconsin bureau is built around community connection, accountability and public participation. Aside from publishing stories, it exists to build a conversation with the people who live and work in northeast Wisconsin.
By exposing the truth, we spark change that improves communities across Wisconsin.
How do you know you can trust our work?
It’s harder than ever to know which information to trust. The sheer volume of news, opinions and misinformation online can make it difficult to separate credible reporting from content that isn’t grounded in facts. We understand that skepticism, and we believe trust must be earned, not assumed.
At Wisconsin Watch, our reporting is built on a commitment to transparency, accuracy and the public interest. We’re part of a network of respected journalism organizations that hold us accountable to high standards:
We are a founding member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a community of nonprofit newsrooms dedicated to investigative reporting that serves the public.
We participate in the Trust Project, a global initiative that developed transparency standards — called Trust Indicators — to help you evaluate the credibility of our work and understand how our journalism is produced.
Through the CatchLight Local Visual Desk, we collaborate with other newsrooms to strengthen visual storytelling and make high-quality journalism more accessible.
As a member of Gigafact, we publish Fact Briefs that quickly and clearly respond to widely shared claims, helping set the record straight.
These partnerships don’t replace your judgment; they’re one way we show our work and invite scrutiny. We encourage you to explore our methods, review our sources when available and hold us accountable. Trust in journalism starts with openness, and we’re committed to providing it.
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism today announced it has joined theTrust Project, an effort to increase transparency and trust in journalism. Starting today, readers will see specially designed Trust Indicators linked from every new story the Center publishes.
The Trust Project is a global network of news organizations that has developed transparency standards to help news readers assess the quality and credibility of journalism. The Trust Indicators are a set of enhancements to participating sites that spell out editorial practices and policies, and provide additional context. On the Center’s site, readers can find the Indicators on the page “About the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism,” and also linked from each new story.
The core set of Trust Indicators was developed by leaders from 80 news organizations and informed by extensive interviews with readers in the United States and Europe. They describe an organization’s commitment to ethics, inclusive reporting, fact-checking and correcting errors, information on journalists’ backgrounds and how they do their work. In addition, the Indicators denote the type of information that a person is reading — such as news, opinion or analysis.
Managing editor Dee J. Hall interviews Bianca Shaw at the State Capitol on Jan. 31, 2018, for a story about Wisconsin’s FoodShare program. Credit: Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
While some news organizations already incorporate and promote these features, the Trust Project has helped to standardize the information, structure it for the public to easily find, and make it available for search engines to read.
Every new story published on WisconsinWatch.org will feature the Trust Project logo and a button that invites the public to read the Center’s policies. In some cases, there will be an additional button that will reveal details about how and why the Center did a report, under a button labeled “Behind the Story.”
Under the policies button, readers can review the Center’s editorial standards and practices and policies on ethics, diversity, corrections, unnamed sources and fact-checking. Readers will also find links to information about how the Center is staffed and funded and its mission statement: “To increase the quality, quantity and understanding of investigative journalism to foster an informed citizenry and strengthen democracy.”
Digital and multimedia director Coburn Dukehart shows her camera to Thomas and Liam Hernandez during a reporting trip for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. The Center was reporting on immigrant labor on dairy farms. Credit: Alexandra Hall / WPR/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
The “Behind the Story” button will lead to more information about who reported, edited, fact-checked and copy-edited the story, as well as statements in some cases about why the Center pursued the project and how it conducted the investigation. Notices of any corrections will also be posted here.
Andy Hall, the Center’s executive director, said news organizations in the Trust Project provide an important defense against online misinformation. The network’s news coverage reaches an estimated 217 million people a month.
“The public needs to be able to determine which news sources to trust as we all seek to understand critical issues in our communities, and potential solutions to problems,” Hall said. “We’re proud to be aboard.”
In incorporating the Trust Indicators, the Center joins more than 120 news sites around the world that are displaying the first digital transparency standard for news that helps people easily recognize the ingredients in trustworthy journalism — much like nutritional labels. Two studies have found that the Trust Indicators help increase readers’ trust in news sites and the journalists who produce the work.
“Today’s internet readers get their information from a multitude of sources, often without knowing anything about the provider,” said Ann Gripper, executive editor of The Mirror in London, one of the participating news organizations. “News organizations need to make it as easy as possible for readers to understand their values and credibility. Our research shows that readers do care about the people and brand providing their news — and giving them that information increases their trust.”
The Indicators also are embedded in the article and site code — providing the first standardized technical language offering information about participating sites. Partners in the technology sector including Google, Bing, Facebook, Nuzzel, PEN America and NewsGuard will use the Indicators to surface, display or better label journalism on their platforms.
Alexandra Hall interviews Armando, a Mexican worker on the Rosenholm farm in Cochrane, Wisconsin. The owner of the farm, John Rosenow is a dairy farmer who says the Wisconsin dairy business could not operate without immigrant labor. Hall was the WPR Mike Simonson Memorial Investigative Reporting Fellow for the Center in 2017. Credit: Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
The Trust Project was founded by award-winning journalistSally Lehrman and is hosted by Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. It is funded by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund and the Markkula Foundation.
“The Trust Indicators are gaining traction as the global industry standard for transparency among newsrooms and beyond,” Lehrman said. “The U.S. elections draw into sharp relief a global issue: the need for credible, honest and accurate news is more urgent than ever. Now, with the Trust Project’s growth, millions of people can use the Trust Indicators and feel secure they can recognize the trustworthy stories that journalists produce every day.”
The news partners joining the Trust Project today more than double the number of existing organizations implementing the Trust Indicators. Trust Indicators can be seen on news sites in the United States, Canada and Europe, including the BBC, the Washington Post, The Toronto Star, The Economist and SkyNews. Companies in the process of adopting Trust Indicators include FRONTLINE, El Mundo and the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis.
INN Labs, part of the Institute for Nonprofit News, worked with the Center to upgrade its site to add the new tools.
The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
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Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism joins the Trust Project to increase transparency and trust in the news
by Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch, Wisconsin Watch October 9, 2018
Coburn Dukehart is an Associate Director at Wisconsin Watch. She joined the organization in 2015 as the Digital and Multimedia Director. She is currently head of product and audience, directs visual and digital strategy; creates visual content; manages digital assets and trains student and professional journalists. Dukehart previously was a senior photo editor at National Geographic, picture and multimedia editor at NPR, and a photo editor at USATODAY.com and washingtonpost.com. She has received numerous awards from the Milwaukee Press Club, National Press Photographers Association, Pictures of the Year International and the White House News Photographers Association.
