Rust’s employer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was in 2007 the largest newspaper in Wisconsin, and one of America’s highest circulation dailies. It ranked first among the 50 largest-population metropolitan markets, with four daily editions and a fulltime staff of 300. [1] Still, it was a relative newcomer to the journalistic scene, the product of a merger 12 years earlier between the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel —both Journal Communications Inc.-owned papers.

The 1995 union had brought together two of the state’s most established institutions. The Sentinel , the oldest continuously-operating business in Wisconsin, had been founded by Milwaukee mayor and former fur trader Solomon Juneau in 1837. The Hearst Corporation bought the paper in 1924, and sold it to the Journal Company in 1962. Meanwhile, the Journal had begun publishing in 1882. The paper won five Pulitzer prizes under famed Editor Lucius Nieman (who died in 1935). [2] It developed a liberal reputation during the 1950s, when it spoke out against Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist “witch-hunts.”

With the emergence of the Internet in the 1990s, newspapers like the Journal Sentinel found themselves struggling to compete. Declining readership and shrinking budgets only compounded their problems. One competitive advantage the paper felt it had in its local market was investigative journalism. “We have to focus on what sets us apart from other media,” Managing Editor George Stanley says.

We have to give our readers and our Internet users stories and journalism and data that they can’t get anywhere else, or that we can deliver better than anybody else. We can do investigative enterprise, in-depth journalism better than anyone else in the state, and so that’s one thing we’re going to base our future on. [3]