By Carolyn Shapiro

This spring, in Dee J. Hall’s investigative reporting class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, journalism students are digging deep to understand the unhealthy conditions of Wisconsin residents. They’re investigating alcohol-related deaths, obesity and rural health care, and they’re questioning state and local health officials about how their departments are addressing these problems.

The semester-long project will ultimately appear on the investigative news site Wisconsin Watch through a partnership with UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Hall’s students produce stories that Wisconsin Watch packages with photography, graphics and compelling display — and then makes available to other news outlets.

“We distribute them to editors across the state,” said Hall, a UW-Madison journalism instructor and Wisconsin Watch managing editor. “Some of these stories are seen by literally millions of people. So it's a great clip for the students.”

Wisconsin Watch is an independent, nonprofit online publication that operates out of free office space in the journalism school’s building on the Madison, Wis., campus. In exchange for the home base, the publication employs a required number of UW journalism students as interns.The internships and class are part of the nonprofit publication’s mission to train future journalists, Hall said.

For the Wisconsin Watch internships, students have to be journalism majors at UW. Three interns work full-time in the summer and often continue into the school year, reducing their hours from 40 per week to about 10, Hall said. They are paid, sometimes with grant funding.

“We feel very strongly that, if you don't pay students to work with you, then first of all, you're not going to get their best effort,” Hall said. “It costs so much to go to school. Very few students can afford to go to school without working. And you just would automatically cut out students who are of lower income” or need to work to support themselves.

Hall and her husband, Andy Hall, were both longtime reporters for the Wisconsin State Journal when he left to launch the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, now known as Wisconsin Watch, in 2009. Initially, most of the reporting was done by student interns. Today, Wisconsin Watch has about 20 staffers, including full-time reporters and editors and journalism fellows with outside funding. It now occupies three rooms in the journalism school’s department, plus reporters and business staff in Milwaukee and Oshkosh.

In 2015, Hall joined Wisconsin Watch as managing editor, and she started teaching her class two years later during the spring semester. The university pays Hall $8,500, an amount reduced from her Wisconsin Watch salary. Students earn four credits while they get the experience of in-depth reporting on a timely topic of significance to Wisconsin readers.

In previous years, Hall’s class completed projects on food insecurity, the contentious 2020 election,  marijuana legalization and state policies for whistleblowers. Because of the course’s popularity, the university bumped it from 14 students to 20 this spring. The stories produced by the students are then rolled out over several months by Wisconsin Watch.

Hall invites “newsmakers,” who serve as primary sources for one or more stories for the semester’s project, to come to class for on-the-record interviews. Students write up summaries of the interview highlights, the best quotes and crucial information.

“I go through them and I give them feedback — also grades — on how well did they capture what this person said,” Hall said. “Did they ask the right follow-up questions? Did they completely misunderstand something that person said? What I'm testing there is their ability to basically process information that's presented” — as professional reporters do in the field.

Erin Gretzinger, a UW-Madison senior double-majoring in journalism and French, took Hall’s class in the spring 2022, continuing as an intern until May 2023. For the food insecurity project, Gretzinger reported on the importance of school meals for families during and after the pandemic.
She enjoyed immersing herself in the project, even more so because she knew it would reach a wide audience through Wisconsin Watch, Gretzinger said.

“The chance to do investigative journalism at a professional level as a student is already a great privilege and something I enjoyed in the class,” she said, adding that Wisconsin Watch has a strong reputation as an “admirable” news outlet among students and the public. “It's very top tier. It’s well-respected in the state. It’s such an amazing opportunity as a student, and then, of course, as an intern to continue that work.”

Between 2017 and 2020, a university-based foundation provided a $40,000 a year grant to support UW students working in the community on investigative projects. “My pitch to them, which they accepted, was that the work that these students were doing was of value to democracy and to the public.”

The money helped offset Wisconsin Watch’s investment to edit the stories, take photos and produce graphics and multimedia elements for the package. Because the stories are published over time, after students leave for the summer, Wisconsin Watch staff has to update information and confirm the status of sources.

The Wisconsin Watch distribution list includes hundreds of news outlets that have requested its content, which they can use for free. “We alert them when we are putting out a story, and they all have access to a part of our site where they can download all the content that they want,” Hall said. “It's got all the photos, graphics, cutlines, the whole thing.”