Tone Madison: Wisconsin Watch’s union could be a turning point for Wisconsin media
On October 23, staff members at nonprofit investigative news outlet Wisconsin Watch announced that they have organized a union under the umbrella of the NewsGuild-CWA, the largest union of journalists in the United States. Called simply the Wisconsin Watch Union (WWU), it brings a recent resurgence in newsroom unionization to Wisconsin. This is particularly significant in a state with a deep labor history, a more recent history of being a lab rat for union-busting via public policy, and a much less unionized media workforce than you might expect.
It’s even more significant given that, in Wisconsin’s state and local media markets, two of the country’s largest newspaper chains have huge footprints. Gannett owns the MilwaukeeJournal Sentinel (the state’s largest newspaper) and 10 other Wisconsin newspapers. Lee Enterprises owns the Wisconsin State Journal and several other newspapers around the state. Both are publicly traded companies, and both have kept up relentless, repeated campaigns of layoffs in their newsrooms around the country. It’s been hard to miss the glaring contrasts between their treatment of journalists and their payouts to executives, even after Gannett CEO Mike Reed took a voluntary pay cut in 2022. The journalists working at these publications still manage to do a lot of incredibly valuable work under the circumstances. But everyone understands that companies like Gannett and Lee are gradually bleeding journalism to death in a vicious, profit-driven cycle, with little to stand in their way.
Local 51 of the NewsGuild-CWA, aka the Milwaukee Newspaper Guild, represents newsroom staff at the Journal Sentinel, and has members at the also-Gannett-owned Sheboygan Press. Still, even that union has lost members amid Gannett’s seemingly endless rounds of layoffs and drain-circling. “In the last 5 years, our bargaining unit, which represents newsroom staff at the @journalsentinel, has shrunk nearly 25%, from 104 to 80,” the union tweeted in February 2023.
Could the Wisconsin Watch Union inspire other journalists around the state, working under different kinds of non- and for-profit business models, to unionize and put up some resistance to the slide? Well, the journalists in that union would probably be the first to tell us not to get ahead of ourselves with speculation. Unionizing Wisconsin Watch is quite a different thing from going up against a giant like Gannett.
That said, WWU is incredibly well-positioned to make an impact beyond its own newsroom. Simply put, people in Wisconsin media tend to hold Wisconsin Watch‘s journalists in high regard. Many outlets around the state (like Tone Madison) routinely republish a lot of their excellent work and/or collaborate directly with Wisconsin Watch in some form or other. That includes some of the Gannett papers, and a whole variety of for- and non-profit outlets of different sizes. These are people who’ve produced a mountain of essential work and earned a ton of awards—no one’s going to be able to write them off as aggrieved slouches or entitled rookies. At the very least, there will be a lot of opportunities for the union’s spirit to rub off. Readers and colleagues who want to support the effort can follow WWU on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, and/or Mastodon.
“We’re always happy to see more journalists organizing and we believe it will benefit us all,” says Local 51 President Rory Linnane, an education reporter at the Journal Sentinel.
Outside of Local 51, journalists in Wisconsin are not heavily unionized. Not even in Madison. The Wisconsin State Journal and Cap Times are not unionized, but they used to be. Unions representing both papers’ journalists and printers joined forces to call a strike in October 1977, after the State Journal adopted new automated printing technology, laid off a large part of its printing staff, and cut pay for the remaining printers. (The company jointly operating both papers was called Madison Newspapers at the time, and Capital Newspapers today.) In the long tradition of the “strike paper,” some of the striking journalists launched an alternative newspaper, the Madison Press Connection. The strike ended in 1983, in a bitter defeat for the unions.
WORT-FM’s full-time staff members (seven, at present) form a “staff collective” that answers to the community radio station’s Board of Directors, and is represented by IBEW Local 2304. Full-time staff at The Progressive, still based in Madison, are represented by Local 2320 of the United Auto Workers. Isthmus? Not unionized. Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin? Their employees work for UW-Madison, so Act 10, the 2011 law kneecapping public-sector unions, is a massive barrier to organizing. Tone Madison? We officially became a worker-owned cooperative as of January 2023. While that means that Tone Madison’s workers have real power within the company, it is not the same thing as a union, a separate organization that bargains with a company.
Media organizations of all shapes and sizes have kept cutting or shutting down in 2023. That includes Gannett, Lee Enterprises, digital-media juggernauts (BuzzFeed News, The Athletic), and public-media institutions like NPR. And that’s not to mention layoffs at Texas Tribune, an absolute rockstar in the growing nonprofit media space Wisconsin Watch inhabits.
Even longer-established unions at legacy media outlets have been feistier recently, staging actions including a June 2023 walkout at two dozen Gannett papers, a December 2022 strike at The New York Times, and a bruising strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that recently entered its second year.
Beyond the nuts-and-bolts matters of negotiating for pay and benefits, unions can also help journalists feel empowered and protected when they feel the need to speak out about problems in their workplaces. Within Madison’s stifled media landscape, that would be refreshing. Journalists here have plenty of gripes—from pay and job security to poor leadership and outdated newsroom cultures—that rarely ever burst out into public discussion.
WWU got rolling earlier in 2023, when staff were talking about revisions to Wisconsin Watch‘s employee handbook. “The big thing that jumped out was that any of us could be let go at any time and that’s kind of standard around the state,” Petrovic says.
Job security is a constant worry for journalists: Media companies have brutally depleted newsrooms with tens of thousands of layoffs in the past few decades. The gutting of journalism jobs has severely weakened coverage of state and local government across the country. That makes it harder for Americans to participate meaningfully as informed voters and citizens, and leaves god knows how much corruption unexposed. Wisconsin Watch and a growing field of other non-profit newsrooms have worked to counter the backsliding by committing their resources to extraordinarily labor- and time-intensive investigative projects.
“We all like our managers and they like us, but we theoretically could get let go at any time,” Petrovic says. “That’s kind of a hard condition to work under, doing challenging stories that make people mad in a volatile news industry.”
There’s no evidence that Wisconsin Watch is headed for dire straits any time soon. But the point is that unions can bargain for severance pay and other protections. Workers have recognized the value of that at a range of for-profit and nonprofit media outlets in recent years, from ProPublica to Politico. In fact, Petrovic cites the ProPublica union as a good example of what WWU would like to accomplish, in part because both are “wall-to-wall” unions—that is, their membership includes both journalists and business staff. “Neither of us exist without the other and are represented under this,” she says.
WWU’s approach so far has been constructive rather than adversarial. Eight Wisconsin Watch staff signed a mission statement calling for “rank-and-file workers across business and editorial” to “play a greater role in decision-making about the structural, strategic and financial future of Wisconsin Watch,” and pledged the union would “improve the transparency, security, culture and diversity of our organization, allowing us to safeguard our role as an indispensable source of rigorous, relevant, fact-checked journalism.”
“Our union’s membership is strong—80% of rank-and-file Wisconsin Watch employees, both from business and editorial sides, have so far signed union authorization cards,” the union’s Twitter account stated in its initial announcement, calling for Wisconsin Watch to voluntarily recognize the union. Currently, that membership encompasses about 10 people working in Madison, Milwaukee, and Oshkosh, investigative reporter Phoebe Petrovic tells Tone Madison.
The organizing effort began before another recent pivotal event in Wisconsin Watch history: the June 30 retirement of veteran journalists Dee and Andy Hall, who co-founded Wisconsin Watch in 2009 under its earlier name, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ). Under the Halls’ leadership, WCIJ/Wisconsin Watch established itself as a top-tier source of in-depth reporting, raised millions of dollars in funding ($1.38 million in 2022, according to its latest annual report), and even survived Wisconsin Republican legislators’ 2013 attempt to boot it from its offices on the UW-Madison campus. Even as WCIJ grew and formed partnerships with national news organizations like ProPublica and Reveal, Dee and Andy extended their collaborative, gracious approach to smaller local outlets.
Even if the unionization effort came before the Halls retired, the evolution of Wisconsin Watch does influence WWU’s drive for recognition and a contract.
“It’s moving from this mom-and-pop startup to a really professional powerhouse. Having a unionized workforce is one way to professionalize the organization,” Petrovic says. “I think what’s important about this predating Andy and Dee’s departure, but also predating George Stanley’s arrival is that it has nothing to do with [Stanley] and it’s not a reflection of his leadership or the leadership of editors that we’ve got here, but rather… of the structural realities of the system that we have in place right now, which is [that] none of us have contracts.”
Former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editor George Stanley became Wisconsin Watch‘s CEO on October 16. In the days after the unionization announcement, Stanley also kept it non-adversarial, not committing to recognizing the union but saying that he would consider voluntary recognition and bring it to the Wisconsin Watch board. After an October 26 meeting with Stanley, the union tweeted: “We are currently working through some details before he takes it to the board of directors next week. We hope to have an update to share soon. We wish to thank everyone for the support so far as we work toward our goal of being voluntarily recognized.”
(I asked Linnane what the Wisconsin Watch Union can expect from bargaining with Stanley, based on Local 51’s experiences at the Journal Sentinel, but Linnane declined to comment on that.)
Full disclosure: I’ve crossed paths with the Halls and various other Wisconsin Watch staff over the years, mostly informally. I also 100 percent support WWU and hope Stanley and the Wisconsin Watch Board of Directors will swiftly recognize the union and sit down to bargain in good faith. Wisconsin Watch has changed the state’s media landscape for the better through its journalism. It can make another positive change by starting off on the right foot with the union.