Journal Sentinel Capable of Good Journalism
When the Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday and it was revealed that Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dave Umhoefer had won the Big Enchilada for local reporting, I was happy for Umhoefer and the rest of the Journal Sentinel staff who worked on this investigation of yet another excessive manipulation of the county pension system to grossly benefit county retirees.
I have tremendous respect for the Pulitzer Prize and I know that this award should not be taken lightly. If you don’t remember this story from last July, it’s worth a read. It’s well-researched and well-written. The bottom line is that county leaders rigged the system to allow certain workers to pay for the privilege of extending their length of service in order to qualify for substantially greater annual benefits.
More than 350 workers paid nearly $3 million in order to convert past summer jobs, internships and other seasonal work, normally ineligible to count towards pension benefits, in order to qualify for additional benefits totalling more than $50 million, in violation of federal tax code and county ordinances.
This was a new wrinkle on the pension scandal that had first been broken by Bruce Murphy and posted on the milwaukeeworld.com web site back in 2001. When Murphy called attention to how the county had implemented new and extraordinarily generous benefits for thousands of county workers, it was seen as a black eye for the Journal Sentinel which not only had missed the story but apparently hadn’t even been sending reporters to cover the meetings where the “pension sweeteners” were discussed.
Some critics, including Michael Horne who now writes for milwaukeeworld.com, fault the Journal Sentinel for not crediting Murphy and his original story with leading to this Pulitzer. Horne scoffs that JS editor Marty Kaiser claims this is the type of reporting that only a newspaper can do. Kaiser’s gratuitous boast appears disingenuous, if not totally dishonest, given how Murphy broke his story in 2001 writing for a web site.
The competition between old-fashioned newspapers, printed on paper and distributed to front doors and driveways, and their online brethren, capable of being updated 24/7 is becoming increasingly moot.
All providers of news need to realize that the internet represents the future. Newspapers, magazines, cable and broadcast television, etc. are simply content producers and consumers want to receive that product in the most convenient version possible.
As traditional circulation drops, newspapers are struggling to figure out how to generate revenue online, not such an easy proposition, given that most people expect access to web sites to be free. Plus, Craigslist and other online classified sites have gutted one of the greatest sources of revenue for newspapers.
This is not unique to the news industry, of course. The music business has been radically transformed by downloading and the iPod and that’s only one example. All news organizations are facing this challenge and resorting to online ads isn’t necessarily the answer.
But that’s an issue for another day. As for whether this Pulitzer was earned by the Journal Sentinel, this story examines how the buyout provision was enacted in the early 1990s and predates the 2001 scandal by about ten years.
JS insiders, including Umhoefer, credit Murphy’s scoop with leading the paper to beef up its coverage of the county to make sure it wasn’t beaten to the punch so badly again but the paper never seems to have acknowledged this in print.
Umhoefer says that he began looking into the buyback provision when he noticed that former Parks Director Susan Baldwin was receiving a higher pension payout than she deserved for her length of service. It turned out that she had paid a onetime amount of $683 to qualify for an additional annual benefit of $9000 (or 22 percent). Not a bad return, eh?
The Journal Sentinel management has been engaged in a campaign for a Pulitzer for a number of years. The paper has focused considerable resources on investigations that could be viewed as Pulitzer-worthy.
Frankly, I thought Meg Kissinger’s Special Report: Abandoning Our Mentally Ill in 2006 seemed to me to be Worthy of The Prize.
In fact, also in 2006, John Fauber and John Diedrich collaborated on a series called Uncounted: Surviving Gunshots, Paying the Price that I thought also might bring home the medal and I also liked Alan Borsuk and Sarah Carr’s four-part series on MPS high schools
Alas, 2007 brought no Pulitzer.
So let’s give credit where credit is due; kudos to Umhoefer and his team for their excellent work on this story. And a virtual high five to Kissinger, Fauber, Dietrich, Borsuk, Carr and others at the Journal Sentinel for the good work they do.
The paper’s editorial page is well-written and accounts for the perception that the Journal Sentinel is dominated by liberals. This is comical since the news coverage often suggests exactly the opposite.
It is disappointing that much of space on the op-ed page is devoted to writers from elsewhere or “average Joe” community columnists, rather than professional, local writers.
Of course, the sports pages are first rate. The Journal Sentinel is the place to go for Packers, Brewers and Bucks coverage. And let’s face it; there are a lot of folks who read nothing else.
I’ll conclude with one last thing about the Pulitzer. The Milwaukee Press Club presents annual awards for outstanding journalism throughout Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has been conspicuously absent from these awards during the last few years. Longtime members of the MPC believe that the paper’s Powers That Be instructed its staff to concentrate on the national awards.
This year, however, Marilyn Krause, an assistant managing editor of the JS is the president of the MPC so it will be interesting to see whether the paper decided to participate in this year’s awards which will be presented later this month.
Stay tuned.
