Greg BorowskiMilwaukee Journal Sentinel
Did you know that in the City of Milwaukee, fewer people are getting married or having children, and they’re living in much smaller households?
I didn’t.
Those shifts have all been happening, largely in the background, for decades. Think about those changes and what they mean for our city’s future – from how many housing units are built to the size and shape of schools to how services are delivered.
That information is the product of something else that has changed over time: Our approach at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to partnerships and collaboration.
Take a close look at that story, and you’ll see two bylines that should now be familiar to our readers: Mike Gousha and John D. Johnson. Both work at the Marquette Law School, which has long partnered with us to help foster insight into key issues facing our community.
The story is drawn from the deepest of dives into data around changes to the family. It is paired with a story by our higher education reporter, Kelly Meyerhofer, who explores how a plummeting number of students is driving a period of massive change at colleges and universities.
At the Journal Sentinel, as we’ve adapted to changes in the news business, we have increasingly used partnerships to expand what we do and to be sure we have the capacity to keep bringing you journalism that matters and has impact. No one else does as much of this type of journalism as we do, or can deliver it as widely or effectively as we can.
For instance, we worked with the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette to pilot and sustain the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism. Each academic year, one of our reporters joins other top journalists from across the country on campus to complete a public service project.
Through O’Brien, we have explored breakdowns in Milwaukee’s mental health system, ways to repair the damaged Great Lakes, diseases that jump from animals to humans, chemicals that harm the lungs of coffee workers and those who vape, solutions for problems facing Milwaukee, and – most recently – a powerful look at the true nature of gun deaths in Wisconsin.
Likewise, grants from the Pulitzer Center have supported travel that has taken our reporters to China to examine how the country is a new competitor to our homegrown paper industry, Vietnam to explain its ascension in the global dairy industry and, in an ongoing series, Mexico and Honduras to explore how manufacturers are moving jobs back to our corner of the world – and whether Wisconsin is poised to capitalize on it.
We have had partnerships around health reporting, youth issues and environmental reporting. We’ve done projects with other news organizations. We’ve raised money from readers to help us launch key beats in areas we have neglected or ignored.
Our view: If there’s an important story, we will find a way to tell it. We’ll be creative. We’ll be smart. We’ll be relentless. And we will tell it.
If anything, we are aiming to build deeper and stronger partnerships – ones that will allow us to strengthen our reporting across the board, including in our neighborhoods.
The partnership with the Marquette Law School, and its Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, began more than a decade ago. It’s part of Dean Joseph Kearney’s vision for making the law school a public square, where ideas are exchanged and debated, and solutions emerge.
The first effort was by longtime business reporter Rick Romell, who produced a series of reports on the region’s entrepreneurial history and its prospects for future growth. The next was by political reporter Craig Gilbert, examining the state’s stark political polarization. (Craig has retired from the Journal Sentinel, but his occasional reports – backed by the Law School – remain a fixture on our pages in print and online).
Many of these projects have won awards and acclaim. That’s great. But more importantly, the projects have each driven important understanding about issues, fueled seminars and discussions, and led to policy changes that aim to push us all forward.
In 2017, thanks to generosity from local investor and philanthropist Sheldon Lubar and his wife, Marianne, the Law School opened the Lubar Center. With Gousha, a longtime Milwaukee journalist, at the helm, the center became the home for the Journal Sentinel collaboration.
These days, rather than one Journal Sentinel reporter working for an extended period on a single project, the idea is to bring more timeliness to the work. Three or four times a year, Gousha and Johnson share research on economic, population, housing and other trends in the Milwaukee area.
Once a specific topic is agreed on, Gousha and Johnson produce an essay based on their research. In turn, the Journal Sentinel identifies a reporter to concurrently produce a separate story that will complement and build off that work.
That’s what we’re highlighting today.
Give both pieces a read.
You’ll surely learn something, just as I did.
Greg Borowski is executive editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. You can follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @GregJBorowski and reach him via greg.borowski@jrn.com.
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