Veterans Leaving Journal Sentinel

On Friday medical reporter John Fauber announced on Facebook he would be retiring from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “where for the last 12 years I’ve worked primarily as an investigative medical reporter.”

His departure follows recent decisions by political reporter Craig Gilbert and sports reporter Tom Haudricourt to retire. The coincidence of three reporters leaving at the same time raised suspicions they might be getting a buyout by the Journal Sentinel, but all three have certainly reached the usual retirement age and given the financial challenges faced by parent company Gannett, there may be no more buyouts on the horizon.

Gilbert’s “retirement” is not quite that, as he noted in a farewell column for the Journal Sentinel. “I will become a fellow this year at the Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. In a partnership between the school and the Journal Sentinel, I’ll continue to write columns and political analysis during the 2022 election cycle.” Gilbert joins former colleagues Alan Borsuk and David Umhoefer, who moved on to jobs at Marquette.

Gilbert was long listed as the newspaper’s DC reporter or more recently “Washington bureau chief” but rarely wrote about anything in the nation’s Capitol or this state’s congressional delegation, while resolutely avoiding any controversy. He tended to stick to columns analyzing voting trends and demographics in Wisconsin, and did an excellent job with that more circumscribed beat.

Haudricourt announced on Twitter that “after 36 years of covering #Brewers and baseball for @journalsentinel, I am announcing my retirement. The plan is to say on job through Feb. or thereabouts. The veteran reporter has covered baseball for 36 years after 8 years with the Richmond Times Dispatch. He also wrote a book celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Milwaukee Brewers. He is retiring amidst an era he declared “a golden age of Brewers’ baseball.”

Fauber “covered everything from the courts to business,” as one writeup noted, beginning with the Milwaukee Sentinel, in 1978, and switching to the Milwaukee Journal in 1988. He eventually became a medical reporter and later took on a more specialized beat. “I didn’t know that investigative medical reporting could even be a newspaper beat,” his FB post noted. “But something clicked around 2010 and my editors let me pursue this story-ripe field on a full time basis,” his Facebook post noted. On Twitter he notes he is writing a book “on investigative reporting, medicine, politics and newspapers.”

Together the three reporters represent 120 years of institutional knowledge, though Gilbert’s stories will continue to be published by the newspaper. They are also three of the most recognizable JS bylines. That said, the newspaper still has a long list of staff members that might shock regular readers, given the number of stories published per day.