Pressroom

It must be getting tougher to sell ads aimed at rich people. The soft and tony magazine Exclusively Yours has fired half its staff. Meanwhile, rival M Magazine is retrenching, having killed one of its three lifestyle magazines. Both aim at the same audience: Milwaukee’s wealthy. Both are mostly sent free to homes in high-income ZIP codes. The targeting can be precise: EY may snub more modest homes while slipping through the mail slots of the mansions next door. Both compete with Milwaukee Magazine for ads, but largely avoid paid subscriptions or newsstands. M is sold at selected bookstores: According…

For decades, the most important beat for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and its predecessor papers was City Hall. A long list of notables manned the post, including Ron Elving (now National Public Radio’s senior Washington editor), current WTMJ talk radio host Charles Sykes and Mike Nichols, now a Journal Sentinel columnist. “To me, the beat is among the most critical – and most vital – at any newspaper,” says Greg Borowski, who’s held the job for eight years for the Journal Sentinel. “There are more readers who live in the city or have interest in things happening here than in…

Kevin Fischer’s a busy guy. He does a blog on FranklinNOW.com.He’s a guest host on WISN-AM 1130, filling in for Mark Bellingand Jay Weber.He’s one of the regular pundits for Milwaukee Public Television’s InterChange program. And he’s a full-time Republican legislative aide. That latter gig has drawn scrutiny to Fischer’s peripatetic media career. Our March Pressroom noted he was one of the bickering bloggers on Journal Communications’ MyCommunityNOW Web sites. Since then, his critics have turned up the heat on his role as an aide to state Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin). Brookfield blogger Cindy Kilkennymade an open-records request for…

It was supposed to be innovative, reader-centered journalism. Instead, the suburban weeklies owned by Journal Communications have spawned some messy food fights between dueling blogs. It was back in 2006 that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s parent company tightened control over its chain of Community Newspapers Inc. weeklies. The company cut the number of papers nearly in half and wiped out distinctive newspaper identities like the Oak Creek Pictorial and New Berlin Citizen– replacing them with cookie-cutter tabloids called NOW that are inserted free in your Journal Sentinel. The tabloids are supplemented by MyCommunityNOW.com– Web sites for each respective suburb. The…

Freelancer Dustin Block insists he wasn’t trying to one-up his old employer. But just days after leaving his job as Racine Journal Times city editor, Block and retired Journal Times publisher Pete Selkowe teamed up to start an online site with a very newspaper-like name. The Racine Post is a first in southeast Wisconsin: A news Web site run by experienced journalists that’s not connected to an established print or broadcast operation. The much larger OnMilwaukee.com does have regular contributors like Doug Hissom and Drew Olson, veterans of the Shepherd Express and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, respectively. But OnMilwaukee emphasizes…

The October message sent a shiver of fear through the newsroom: Due to declining profits, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel needed to shed at least 50 employees. If there weren’t enough volunteers for the buyout being offered, management would pick people to be axed. On the day of that announcement, JS reporter Jamaal Abdul-Alim was in probate court wrapping up his late mother’s estate. He’d also just begun a nine-month sabbatical for a fellowship at the University of Michigan. With his mother’s death, “there’s nothing else keeping me connected to the city” besides the paper, he says. So Abdul-Alim filled out…

Mayor John Norquist was ducking rumors of a sex scandal two weeks before election day, so columnists Cary Spivak and Dan Bice decided to pay a surprise visit to his then-lawyer, Anne Shindell. When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters stepped onto an elevator in her building, they found the mayor himself. “It really was dumb luck,” Spivak recalls with a smile. “Obviously, something was going on,” says Bice. “This was a very tense situation.” Tucked under Norquist’s arm was a copy of their latest column, “Spivak & Bice,” which contained allegations of a possible sexual harassment complaint against him. After…

 Tom Heinen, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s full-time religion reporter since 1997, quickly alerted Editor Marty Kaiser after getting a tip on May 13 about a blockbuster settlement between Archbishop Rembert Weakland and an unnamed man. Heinen knew it would be a race to break the story because his source told him that other newsrooms were hot on the trail. What Heinen didn’t know was that the Journal Sentinel already had a copy of Weakland’s 1980 letter to Paul Marcoux. Reliable sources tell Milwaukee Magazine that JS reporter Marie Rohde had the letter since 1992, when she was religion reporter for…

Eric Schutt, campaign manager for U.S. Senate candidate and car dealer Russ Darrow, sounded eager to share his good news with us. According to Schutt, conservative media pundit J.J. Blonien had started his new job as the campaign’s full-time communications director that very day, January 19, and they were set to publicly announce the hire. That all changed when we asked about a recent plagiarism allegation against Blonien. Faster than you can say persona non grata, Schutt began distancing the campaign from Blonien. Blonien is best known as the notorious loose cannon on Mark Belling’s television show, “Belling & Co.,”…

When reporter Ben Tracy left WISN-Channel 12 in 2001 to be Marquette University’s top public relations flack, some observers whispered that he sold out his credibility and slammed the door on his journalism career. At the time, even Tracy cast doubt on a return to reporting: “I’m not naive. I don’t think that would be an easy jump.” This month, Tracy is taking the leap back to television as a reporter at WCCO-Channel 4 in Minneapolis, a move that’s so rare it has tongues wagging from here to Minnesota. What’s the big deal? Clearly, it has everything to do with…