The Investigative Team
© Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Journal Sentinel decided to back its words with actions. In November 2006, it hired Mark Katches as assistant managing editor for projects and investigations. Katches had been the senior team leader for watchdog journalism at California’s Orange County Register , and had impressed Journal Sentinel Editor Martin Kaiser when they judged journalism awards together. Kaiser invited Katches to Milwaukee to discuss building an investigative team. The timing proved fortuitous: the Orange County Register was in the midst of cost cutting, and chose to trim its investigative reporting efforts just as the Journal Sentinel was planning to boost its own.

When Katches came on board, the paper had been without a special projects manager for six months. Editors had noticed a clear fall-off in communication among departments working on common projects, as well as a decline in quality. “We were getting stuff that wasn’t even close to ready… Things were taking too much time as well, because people weren’t getting the right kind of guidance,” Stanley says. Katches made it a priority to reestablish a control center.

The paper also expanded its investigative capabilities. By early 2007, the paper had assigned eight reporters and one columnist to a “watchdog team” under Katches’ supervision. There had been some misgivings about taking this direction. Managing Editor Stanley explains:

We had kind of avoided the team approach in the past because we had seen how it could develop… They [team members] wouldn’t really be part of the newsroom, and other people would be jealous of them… [Our experience had been that] when people are taken out of their areas of expertise and set aside to do all the investigative reporting, their sources dry up over time and they become less and less productive, until they really don’t expect to do anything more than one project a year and they can just take victory laps the rest of the time.

Katches disagreed, and made a strong argument for a team approach. He had overseen numerous reporting teams during his work at the Orange County Register , including Pulitzer Prize-nominated efforts in 2003 and 2004. [1] But at the same time, he did see value in keeping team members active in regular newsroom life. “Mark [Katches] made some pretty compelling arguments about the need for people with skills that we could develop and we’d team them up, but who’d still be in their original areas, working alongside other journalists. That really fit in well with what we wanted to do,” Stanley says.

Convinced by Katches’ vision, the Journal Sentinel established the new investigative group and tasked it to “work to expose wrongdoing, dysfunction, inequity and injustice and strive to hold accountable those responsible through meticulous case building and compelling story telling.” [2] As Katches recalls it:

The culture here was more calibrated towards explanatory work. [Investigative work is] a matter of going out and beating the bushes, talking to the bureaus, letting [reporters] know, as a first matter of course, these are the kinds of stories we want people to be looking for…hard-edged watchdog stories that hold people accountable. [3]

[3] Author’s interview with Mark Katches on June 23, 2008, in Milwaukee, WI. All further quotes from Katches, unless otherwise attributed, are from this interview.