Monthly Archives: March 2021

This year’s Openness in Government (Opee) Awards recognize Wisconsin’s largest newspaper for its dogged records-based coverage of the pandemic and its commitment to the cause of transparency in government, as well as a government agency that led the way in providing a maximum amount of information on COVID-19.

Other winners include a municipal judge who has pushed the village he lives in to become more open and an unnamed litigant who fought for the right to obtain records anonymously.

The awards, presented annually by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, recognize outstanding efforts to protect the state’s long tradition of open government, and highlight some of the threats to it. They are being announced in advance of the American Society of News Editors’ national Sunshine Week (sunshineweek.org), March 14-20. This is the 15th consecutive year that Opees have been awarded.

“COVID-19 has forced wholesale changes in how government officials conduct the public’s business,” said Bill Lueders, Council president. “Maintaining a maximum amount of transparency, as the state’s openness laws require, is more important than ever.”

The Council, founded in 1978, is a nonprofit group that consists of about two dozen members representing media and other public interests. Sponsoring organizations include the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, Wisconsin Broadcasters Association, Wisconsin Associated Press, and the Madison Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Awards are being given this year in six categories. The winners are:

Media Openness Award (“Mopee”): Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Even in tough times, the state’s largest paper blazed a trail for open government. It fought recalcitrant officials to do records-based reporting on COVID-19 in long-term care facilities (Daphne Chen and Rory Linnane) and meatpacking plants (Maria Jesus Perez Sanchez). It intervened in a lawsuit to oppose efforts to shield the names of businesses with COVID-19 cases. And it joined with other litigants in suing the state Legislature over its refusal to release records regarding misconduct investigations.

Political Openness Award (“Popee”): Milwaukee County

While some public entities embraced secrecy over COVID-19, this municipality was among the first in the nation to release racial and ethnic data linked to the pandemic. The county created a public dashboard of demographic information about cases, hospitalizations and deaths, including age, gender, race and ethnicity, and underlying health conditions — data used by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters and other members of the public.

Citizen Openness Award (“Copee”): John Doe

This unnamed person successfully sued the Madison Metropolitan School District to enforce the ability of citizens to get records anonymously, as the Open Records Law explicitly allows. Kudos also to attorney Tom Kamenick of the Wisconsin Transparency Project, which brought the suit.

Open Records Scoop of the Year (“Scoopee”): Tie: Molly Beck, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Emily Hamer, Wisconsin State Journal

Beck and her paper were the first to report that Jim Troupis, President Donald Trump’s lead election lawyer in Wisconsin, filed a list of names of Wisconsin residents he claimed had cast illegal absentee votes which included himself and his wife. Beck checked the county’s list of absentee voters to confirm that Troupis was literally trying to disallow his own vote.

Meanwhile, the State Journal distinguished itself with Hamer’s persistent reporting on COVID-19 in the state’s prisons, including protracted efforts to procure relevant records and the development of courageous sources within the prison system. They revealed that some staff came to work with symptoms or after exposure to the virus, among other dangerous practices.

Whistleblower of the Year (“Whoopee”): Peter Tharp

This municipal judge sued his tiny village of Roberts in St. Croix County over its failure to respond to more than 80 record requests made over a three-year period. In October, the village agreed to settle, providing more than 1,500 records and paying $7,500 in fees, costs and damages. Tharp also had his attorney, Tom Kamenick, file a complaint identifying deficiencies in the village’s Open Meetings practices, and send a letter urging improvement, which Kamenick says it has pledged to do.

No Friend of Openness (“Nopee”): The UW System

The state university system conducted its search for a new president in a shroud of secrecy, until only one finalist was left. Then that lone finalist backed out, in part due to the outcry over the process. The Board of Regents were forced to restart the process from scratch, urged by the Wisconsin State Journal to “learn from their mistakes.” We’ll see.

RTDNA is hosting a session on March 25 about the place of commentary in news coverage:

There is a place for commentary journalism, but it is not a substitute for carefully sourced fact based reporting.

RTDNA’s new coverage guidelines offer advice and direction on how to properly identify commentary in news coverage and how to make sure it upholds the journalistic promise of Truth and Accuracy. Join the RTDNA Ethics Committee on March 25 to see how.

Register

Sign up now for a 30-minute lunch and learn on March 25 at 1 p.m. CT to learn how to ethically and effectively use identify commentary in journalism.

Members of the RTDNA Board of Directors and Ethics Committee, Tim Scheld of WCBS Newsradio 880 in New York City and Lynn Hatter of WFSU in Tallahassee, will review the new coverage guidelines and help develop strategies to apply them in your newsroom.

Poynter is offering training for first-time journalists to help them navigate open records requests:

Open Records Success: Strategies for Writing Requests and Overcoming Denials 
Self-directed course, start anytime 
This course, designed for first-time and student journalists, will make the process of requesting public documents easier. Participants will learn precisely how to word requests and how to overcome objections and denials from public agencies. 

Cost: Free. Suggested donation: $20. . 

WKBT chief meteorologist Cory Malles announced Friday that he’s stilled down from his position to focus on his private life.

He presented this message to viewers.

A former anchor in Milwaukee is joining CBS 58 (WDJT-TV) as the station’s Director of Strategic Initiatives.

Nicole Koglin was a morning show anchor at WITI-TV before leaving in July. Her role at CBS 58 is a new one for the station. She will oversee all aspects of station projects and partnerships. She will also be appearing regularly in CBS 58 newscasts.  

“As a Milwaukee native, Nicole truly understands our community,” said General Manager Anne Brown. “She brings a long history of real connection to the people of Southeastern Wisconsin which will serve her well in her new role.”

 “I am so thrilled to join the CBS58 team! The station is headed in an excellent direction, carving out a real identity in this community that I care so much about,” Koglin said. “What an amazing opportunity to be part of the growing process.”

She is a native of Menomonee Falls and a graduate of UW-Madison. She has worked in Milwaukee television since 2004. 

Koglin will join CBS 58 in the summer. 

If your newsroom is interested in improving your coverage of racial inequity, you’ll want to read about what a group of ABC owned stations are up to.

Knight-Cronkite News Lab is highlighting the work of eight stations that took on a project funded by the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge. 

Read all about it here.

Wisconsin lawmakers will soon begin redrawing congressional and state voting boundaries, in accordance with the latest Census. It’s a good time to reflect on how that process has played out before — and for the public to demand greater transparency this time around.

A good example of how things ought not work comes from the last round of redistricting, in 2011.

In July of that year, Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature new legislative district maps on a Friday, held a single public hearing in Madison five days later, and passed the maps a week after that. Republican Gov. Scott Walker the new maps into law a month after they became public.

It was the first time since the 1950s that a single party had complete control of the process, and it allowed Republicans to cement control of the Legislature for a decade — even in 2018, when Democrats won every statewide election.

As later court cases and news reporting , the mapmaking process was an affront to the state’s tradition of open government.

The maps were drawn in a closely guarded “map room” in a law firm across the street from the Capitol. Only Republicans were allowed in to see the new maps, and only if they signed nondisclosure agreements.

When Democrats briefly took the majority in 2012, they demanded to see the redistricting records that had been hidden from them. Looking at the mapmakers’ computers, they found that hundreds of thousands of documents had been deleted and one hard drive had been damaged.

Still, records recovered from the hard drives (it turns out deleting files doesn’t always destroy them) showed with each map draft, Republicans were tweaking them to be more and more politically advantageous. The Republicans were deliberately trying to pack Democrats into fewer districts to help Republicans win more seats.

Whether or not you like politicians picking their voters (and the of referendums or resolutions in 56 counties across the state calling for nonpartisan redistricting suggest most voters don’t), the public should want a more transparent process than what happened in 2011.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ budget proposal retaining all legislative redistricting records for 10 years and making sure all legislative redistricting meetings comply with the open meetings law. That would be a good start for building more confidence in the redistricting process.

Yet there is every indication that Republicans will try to keep the process as opaque as possible while doing everything they can to draw maps for their own partisan advantage.

The news site Wispolitics.com recently that Republicans are planning to spend upwards of $1 million of taxpayer money on outside lawyers on redistricting lawsuits. The 2011 redistricting litigation at least $3.5 million, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

With such a high price tag, it’s important to reiterate the conclusion the three judges, including two Republican appointees, reached in the 2011 litigation in which they blasted the “peculiarly furtive process adopted by the majority party.”

Aptly, they added: “The people of Wisconsin deserve better in the next round of redistricting after the 2020 census.”

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (), a group dedicated to open government. Matthew DeFour, a council member, is state politics editor for the Wisconsin State Journal.