Good Sources for News About MOSES Issues
By Sherry Reames
Wisconsin Watch describes itself as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to using journalism to make the communities of Wisconsin strong, informed and connected” and emphasizes its rigorous fact-checking and its civic mission: “to hold power accountable.” The organization’s online newsletter, Wisconsin Weekly, collects stories from all over the state, with an emphasis on public policy decisions and their effects on our communities. The archive is easy to search for past stories. With a news bureau focused specifically on the Capitol, Wisconsin Watch provides especially good coverage of state government and politics, including public hearings and candidate forums. Online subscriptions are free, and donations are tax-deductible.
Stories specifically on criminal-justice issues do not appear regularly in the feed from Wisconsin Watch, but when they do appear, they are always well-researched and instructive. Examples so far in 2026 include two articles on responses to the governor’s new commutation program; one on Wisconsin’s prison population that is part of a series; one on a controversial parole decision; and, most recently, one on a new initiative in Milwaukee to improve public safety in high-need neighborhoods by connecting existing violence-intervention programs with wellness services, housing assistance, and job opportunities.
Like Wisconsin Watch, The Wisconsin Examiner is a free, nonprofit, online news source with a Wisconsin focus. Like Wisconsin Watch, it proclaims its civic mission: “Digging Up the Truth in the Badger State.” But the Examiner‘s coverage is much wider than Wisconsin, since it participates in a national network, States Newsroom, and always includes national stories in its feed. And The Examiner makes no pretense of being nonpartisan. In fact, its mission statement explicitly connects it with “Wisconsin’s great progressive tradition”; and its editor, Ruth Conniff (formerly of the Progressive Magazine), writes editorials that regularly adhere to that perspective.
For those of us in MOSES and WISDOM, the main selling point of the Examiner is that it focuses a lot of attention on the criminal-legal system. In fact, it currently has a Criminal Justice Reporting Project, supported by the Public Welfare Foundation, which evidently funds extra coverage of these issues and employs at least one reporter, Frank Zufall, as a Criminal Justice Fellow. So if we are looking for detailed news stories on “our” issues or “our” events, we are most likely to find them in The Examiner. A recent example, dated June 24, is Isiah Holmes’s article about the June 22 WISDOM gubernatorial candidates’ forum. Another example, also dated June 24, is Frank Zufall’s story about opposition to the Department of Corrections’s latest rewrite of the short-term sanctions law. For this story, Zufall got a lot of input from Tom Gilbert of MOSES and JenAnn Bauer of FREE.