Pressroom

Across the country, newspapers are ditching costly investigative reporting and relentlessly running local – almost hyperlocal – coverage. The approach saves staff costs for papers beset by shrinking revenue, and the uniquely local stories woo readers engulfed by online alternatives.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is a remarkable exception. Facing the same pressures, it has instead increased its investigative reporting with massive projects bordering on journalistic crusades, led by a long series on drunken driving and one on the hazards of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA). These have joined quicker, consumer-oriented “Public Investigator” stories and a series of online databases, all part of what the JS calls its “Watchdog” reporting.

Mark Katches,hired about two and a half years ago to oversee the Watchdog team, has powerful backing from top Editors Martin Kaiser and George Stanley along with Publisher Betsy Brenner. “They universally feel project and investigative journalism is one of the core missions,” says Katches. “These stories, when done right, make an impact. They resonate with readers.”

Journalism insiders love the approach. Editor & Publisher and American Journalism Review magazines have praised the paper, and JS reporter Dave Umhoefer won a well-deserved Pulitzer last year.

The paper’s ongoing coverage of BPA has made effective use of reporter Susanne Rust’s background as a scientist. Rather than doing the standard, “he-said, she-said” reporting on the chemical’s hazards, the series drew its own conclusions. “They went into territory where many journalists fear to tread,” says Marquette University professor Robert Griffin, who researches how the media handle topics such as environmental and health risks. “The paper dug into the scientific documents. That’s actually gutsy.”

Rust and veteran reporters Meg Kissinger and Cary Spivak also documented the chemical industry’s role in producing research that pronounced the chemical safe in the face of contradictory evidence.

Griffinalso praises the paper’s sophisticated statistical analysis on another project: the city of Milwaukee’s foot-dragging on street repairs in minority neighborhoods.

But whatever their journalistic value, do these stories attract readers? “The public is many times not as hot about the issue as the newspaper is,” says another Marquette professor, James Scotton, who formerly worked with several news organizations.

More stinging is radio talker Mark Belling. In his weekly Waukesha Freeman column, he blasted the JS for de-emphasizing local coverage and becoming an “irrelevantly written and edited paper for the purpose of winning awards and impressing only its own staff ... that has lost all sight of actually giving people what they

But Katches says the JS gives people what they want. He claims online traffic grew by double digits “month over month over month” as people flocked to jsonline.com to look at data on everything from campaign donations to restaurant inspections.

The paper’s “Wasted in Wisconsin” series was certainly local, but verged on overkill. It followed the publication a few weeks earlier – by the Appleton Post-Crescent in conjunction with the Gannett chain’s nine other state papers – of an in-depth report on alcohol and Wisconsin culture. That project took a broader, almost sociological approach, led off by a statistical analysis ranking all 50 states in 10 measures related to alcohol, with the Dairy State finishing first. Editors at both papers say the timing of the two projects was coincidental, and the series were distinct. The JS focused on drunken driving, complete with 72 days of profiles of dead drunken drivers or their victims.

Scotton wryly jokes about “the crusade against drunk driving for years and years – no, I guess it’s been months and months.”

Yet Katches says the project sparked “more reader reaction than any story I’ve ever been involved in” – much of it from people who said the series made them examine their own behavior.

Is the paper abandoning its traditional role as neutral reporter? MU journalism prof Larry Soley says this kind of journalism has a longer history than so-called objectivity. In fact, he’d like to see more crusading. The BPA stories were grounded in first-class research and left him “indignant,” while the drunk driving series, he argues, was safer: “It doesn’t alienate anybody.”

Scotton, however, questions whether all the enterprise journalism will work as a business strategy. “Given the state of the newspaper business, it’s pretty risky.”

In essence, the paper is de-emphasizing traditional coverage of local and state governmental meetings for a more sporadic, but more in-depth, kind of local coverage. “No one can do this type of work if we don’t do it,” says Katches. “It separates us from every other type of media.”

If it works, it could become a model for newspapers elsewhere. If it doesn’t, the JS still deserves enormous credit for bucking the industry with such a commitment to enterprise reporting.

Yet the approach sometimes seems overdone. No one is asking the paper to leash its Watchdog. But the hound might spend a little less time chewing old bones and a little more time digging up fresh meat.