How does a news story reach public awareness? Often it’s obvious. Sometimes, though, it’s almost in slow motion – in dribs and drabs that take a long time to add up, and even then, what they add up to isn’t clear. Here’s one example.
A few weeks ago at Pressroom Buzz we puzzled (scroll down to the third item) over the relative lack of mainstream media coverage of a new Michigan law giving that state’s governor sweeping powers to take over local municipalities deemed to be in fiscal crisis.
Over the weekend, word that Gov. Scott Walker might be seeking such a law in Wisconsin began to bubble up.
It started getting traction with the Forbes.com blog of Rick Ungar (whom we wrote about last month). Ungar reported:
Following the lead of Michigan GOP Governor Rick Snyder, Walker is said to be preparing a plan that would allow him to force local governments to submit to a financial stress test with an eye towards permitting the governor to take over municipalities that fail to meet with Walker’s approval.
Ungar sourced his information to Ed Garvey, the well-known Madison political gadfly and 1998 Democratic candidate for governor. Last week, Garvey hadn’t gotten much notice when he wrote on his website, FightingBob.com:
The secret plan is being prepared by the state’s largest law firm, Foley & Lardner, for the Greater Milwaukee Committee, the Bradley Foundation, the governor, and key legislators.
Monday Garvey went into more detail, describing what sounded like a fully fleshed-out plan that he’d received anonymously:
FightingBob.com received a hand-delivered packet of materials last Friday. Main features:
1.) Walker to push a Wisconsin version of the Michigan plan through the Legislature in May.
2.) Legislative strategy provided by former state senator Mary Panzer.
3.) “Legislation is now being developed behind closed doors by Foley & Lardner.”
4.) Gene Ulm hired to do public relations for the Greater Milwaukee Committee to promote Make It Your Milwaukee County, and, according to the organization’s fact sheet, to see that the organization is “expanded to include all local governments.”
(Gene Ulm [PDF] is a Virginia-based Republican pollster.)
Monday Walker went on Charlie Sykes’ show on WTMJ-AM and flatly denied it, but Garvey stood firm:
The word is that they are all set to fast-track the bill in May. Is this incredible or what?
The Capital Times in Madison also picked up on the story, and like Garvey, linked to the “Make It Your Milwaukee County” website. That site appears to be intended to build support for a plan to effect “bold change” and achieve “real reform.” The very first step, listed under “Create a Statewide ‘Local Government Flexibility Toolkit’”:
Develop a statewide fiscal stress test through the State Department of Revenue to help local governments maintain fiscal health.
Other items on the agenda include reining in legacy pension and health care costs for county employees and revamping in particular the county’s mental health programs. And on a list of media links, there’s one to a CBS News story about the Michigan law.
The “Make It Your Milwaukee County” site itself is mysterious, with virtually no clues as to its provenance, but it’s the product of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, which unveiled it back in February as part of a campaign “to help address critical fiscal and structural issues facing the county.” Steve Schultze wrote about the initiative the day it was unveiled Feb. 14, and so did the JS editorial page. A few weeks later it was the subject of an op-ed promoting it by GMC president Julia Taylor along with Maria Monreal-Cameron and Wallace White.
Despite that coverage, however, the initiative hasn’t seemed to reach top of mind for many. Now, rightly or wrongly, it has been picked up by Walker’s critics as evidence of a similar “financial martial law” bill afoot here. WUWM picked up the story on Monday afternoon’s broadcast (and this morning added a correction).
That’s put the GMC on the defensive. Monday the civic group put out a statement [PDF] defending its proposal, which Elizabeth Kelly of Mueller Communications emailed to Pressroom Buzz this morning in response to our call to the GMC about the “Make It Your Milwaukee County” initiative. Says the statement:
The proposed stress test would solely focus on encouraging greater openness and transparency in the operation of local government. It would rely on information municipalities already provide to the Department of Revenue and require the state to publish this information online in an easily understandable format for public review.
Our position is simple: people have a right to know the financial health of their local governments.
Contrary to the rumors that circulated this weekend, the Initiative does not support providing the state with the ability to takeover cities and other entities.
In response to some followup
questions from me, Kelly told me in an email:
We
are advocating for legislation that would solely
focus on encouraging greater openness and transparency in the operation of
local government. The legislation would require the Department of Revenue to
publish information from local governments online in an easily understandable
format for public review.
Most,
if not all of this information, is already provided by local governments but is
not readily available to the general public.
We are
solely recommending that the state take information municipalities and counties
already provide and make it easily understandable and readily available for any
citizen to access.
Unlike in
Michigan, the proposed Wisconsin stress test would solely focus on encouraging
greater openness and transparency in the operation of local government. It
would largely rely on information municipalities already provide to the
Department of Revenue and require the state to publish this information online
in an easily understandable format for public review.
Yet for all the talk of transparency, there’s a bit of an irony. Nowhere on the “Make It Your Milwaukee County” website is there any transparency about who is behind it. The “Contact Us” tab just leads to a form to fill out. None of the “frequently asked questions” at the FAQ page are along the lines of “Who are you guys, anyway?” – and on the “About” tab, we’re only told:
We are a broad-based coalition of local businesses, community organizations and individuals that have joined together to advocate for real reform for Milwaukee County.
Not until a visitor follows a link to sign up for a subscription to the newsletter and sees the fine print is there an inkling of the site’s origin:
Greater Milwaukee Committee uses SafeUnsubscribe which guarantees the permanent removal of your email address from its mailing lists.
So is this all part of a secret, sinister “financial martial law” plan?
It doesn’t look yet as though we know the whole story. Perhaps not; as I’ve already noted, the GMC openly promotes the program on its own website.
But when you put together the initiative site’s lack of clear information on where it’s from and a politically charged atmosphere in which at least half the state’s radar is tuned for the worst, at the very least this has turned out to be a political-media accident waiting to happen.
Or, if Garvey is right, it could be a lot more.
*
Well, that didn’t last long: The ink was barely dry on the May issue of Milwaukee Magazine with our Pressroom column profiling new Journal Sentinel columnist O. Ricardo Pimentel when the other shoe dropped.
Barely four months after stepping down from his post as editorial page editor at the JS to write his column, Pimentel is heading out the door. Starting May 9, he’ll be a metro columnist for the San Antonio Express News in Texas.
Pimentel swears that when we interviewed him seven weeks ago for the May article, there was nothing in the wind for a new job. “I had put out no feelers,” he insists. He had no intention of leaving Wisconsin. “I thought we were here for the duration.”
Pressroom has heard quiet speculation that one reason Pimentel had abdicated his editing post for a columnist’s slot in Milwaukee was to raise his profile and make himself more marketable elsewhere. He denies that. “I’m soon to be 58 years old. I didn’t know I had any market left in me,” he says.
But word of his job change reached editors in San Antonio, “and I think they saw an opening,” he continues. A call came for a job interview and, subsequently, an offer for the job. “I liked the offer, and I said yes.”
In San Antonio, Pimentel will be strictly a metro columnist, not a member of the editorial board as he is here. His column output will rise to three times a week from the current two, but he won’t be writing editorials any more.
“I’m not having to write in a consensus voice anymore,” he says. “We’re talking my voice, my columns. I prefer to write in my own voice.”
Although he’s only visited San Antonio twice – the second time for the job interview – having grown up in Southern California, he finds that the heavily Hispanic Texas city “does feel a lot like home for me.”
Pimentel reiterated what he told me for the May column – that stepping into the role of an opinionated columnist just as the polarizing Walker took office turned out to be a great move and a lot of fun.
“I’m having a ball,” he says. But he doesn’t expect that to stop.
“I don’t think Texas will be short of issues.”
*
Once again, the Journal Sentinel‘s investment in in-depth reporting has paid off in the form of the newspaper’s third Pulitzer Prize in four years. This time the award was for explanatory journalism and went to the paper for its project “One in a Billion.” The three-part series of stories and online content examined a medical enigma: the quest to sequence the DNA of a 5-year-old boy to unravel the mysterious disorder attacking his digestive system.
Reporters Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher, photographer Gary Porter, graphics editor Lou Saldivar and interactive producer Alison Sherwood all shared in the recognition, announced Monday.
For years, Johnson has carved out a distinctive niche at the paper as a scientific storyteller, authoring complex and highly textured stories about research and researchers. His work has exemplified one of the newspaper’s core strategies – to focus its resources on big, resource-intensive reporting and coverage that readers won’t find elsewhere. The prize is likely to reinforce that strategy.
It also is one more illustration of how integral the newspaper’s online efforts have become to its journalism output. Print subscribers got stories, graphics and pictures in the daily paper. Online they could get more: video interviews, interactive graphics, and online chats with the reporters and some of the people featured in the story.
The award coincides with a change in Pulitzer rules that allowed “multidisciplinary teams to be entered together for their work,” as the JS noted in its story on the prize.
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