![]() Any further shrinkage of the number of bodies covering the statehouse means fewer people being held accountable and less original content for the rest of us to share and bicker about. More watchdogs over government is good for democracy the Journal Sentinel’s state coverage is some of its best. They might consolidate the reporting staffs of operations where that makes sense too, like statewide beats concerning politics or the state legislature. We can probably expect to be a lot more educated about the goings on in Appleton and Green Bay, as Gannett may find it tempting to share content among its Wisconsin papers. ![]() It raises the prospect the building downtown will go too. The Journal Sentinel won’t be the heavy hitter in the chain anymore, either. It’s also bad for Milwaukee and Wisconsin any time a corporation decides we’re an OK region for an outpost but not a mothership. A big chain, with a lot of papers in the Fox Valley and throughout the country, is more impersonal. It’s almost never good to have the corporate headquarters located outside the town you cover as it will be now, creating an ever distant set of decision-makers not connected to our place. Here are five reasons the Gannett purchase is bad for Milwaukee – and one reason it might not be: 1. So I get and understand what it was and why it still matters. I was a Journal sports agate clerk, a Sentinel intern, a part-time Journal suburban reporter and then a full-time reporter at the Journal Sentinel for a decade, leaving for UWM in 2004. I got my own start at the paper as a gopher delivering mail and coffee to Sentinel reporters in about 1991. She helped integrate the Milwaukee Press Club. They only let her cover women’s issues back then. She had them in a photo album in their dusty old attic in Wauwatosa. I used to look at her old press passes when I was a kid. My grandmother Marian "Toni" McBride was a pioneering female political reporter for the Sentinel. My grandfather was a reporter and columnist, including for the Green Sheet for the Journal for more than 40 years, writing about his big, boisterous Irish-American family. They ran a picture of me on the fashion page in a little dress. I was actually in the paper first when I was about 1 or 2. Ever since that moment, being a journalist was all I ever wanted to do. I remember the smell of his pipe, and how exciting and busy the whole place seemed. My grandfather, Raymond McBride, walked me into the newsroom. My first visit to the old Milwaukee Journal newsroom occurred when I was about age 5. I say this despite the boosterish comments from publisher Betsy Brenner, whose legacy seems to be presiding over never-ending buyouts even as she promises robust coverage that seems to occur less than it used to. Unfortunately, I don’t see the big announcement Thursday that the national Gannett chain purchased the paper and its parent company as a good thing moving in the right direction. The Journal Sentinel does a lot of this reportorial heavy lifting. On an information highway glutted with opinion, rumor, abridged articles and partisan sites, not to mention TV stations that too often traffic in endless fragmented disorder imagery, it’s nice to know there are still people in town willing to sit at school board and Common Council meetings, and pore through records obtained through open records requests – and that someone will pay them to do it. I admire reporters who ask tough questions, and use context and details. ![]() It’s the print ethos I prefer, whether the words are written in ink or on the web. It’s not the paper and ink I’m wedded to, though – although I also have a weekly column in the Waukesha Freeman printed product. I say that as a fan and teacher of innovative and modern online formats and –obviously, since you’re reading this – a writer for one. We need our urban daily to not only survive here but to thrive. Whether you like the current version of the paper or not, we should all agree: It’s good for civic life overall. There’s some not so good work that goes on down there too, but there’s no need to dwell on that. Correct that: There’s some great work that happens there, and I used some of it in one of my classes at UW-Milwaukee earlier this week as an example (Raquel Rutledge’s series on daycare fraud). There’s some really good work that still goes on at 4 th and State, generating a lot of Pulitzer hardware. The newsroom, at least when I was there a year ago, felt like a ghost town, at least comparatively. The decline of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (and, yes, it’s been a steady decline) has been a very sad thing to watch from afar, especially for someone, like me, whose family has been tied to 4 th and State off and on since at least the 1930s. ![]()
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