I teach my investigative reporting classes in collaboration with a small non-profit, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. WCIJ was founded in 2009 by Andy Hall, a long-time investigative journalist with our local paper, the Wisconsin State Journal. There exists an agreement in which our school provides the center two small rooms (and they are walk-in closet small) and in turn the center provides training services to our students, in classes like mine, and also hires university students as interns. They raise their own money for their operations. And they pay their interns, by the way, which many much wealthier publications do not do.
But, astonishingly, last week our legislative joint finance committee inserted a motion into the proposed budget that would ban the WCIJ from maintaining its offices on campus – and would forbid any university employee such as myself from working with the center. This despite the fact that there is no apparent budget issue here except one that works in our favor – we provide linited existing space in exchange for a remarkable benefit to our students.
But ascribing this action to “the committee” doesn’t really do the situation justice. This “budget motion” was created by the GOP members of a GOP controlled committee in a GOP dominated legislature (and if left intact will eventually land on the desk of our GOP governor, Scott Walker.) It passed on party lines, 12 Republicans voting for it and all four Democrats on the committee both voting against the measure and publicly denouncing it.
One is that we want to teach young journalists to value “reporting for the public good”. We need more journalists who care about that and we need more investment in that kind of reporting. And second, our legislators may feel that by taking this action they are either protecting themselves or punishing the center. But they are foremost punishing students. This is a move that diminishes rather than improves the quality of education at this uniquely great university that has thrived in a relatively small, mostly rural state in the upper Midwest.
