Get to know award-winning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigative reporter John Diedrich
John Diedrich started at the bottom of this business. The ground floor anyway.
As a college student, Diedrich drove newspaper trucks, delivering the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel across Wisconsin 35 years ago. The job plunged him into journalism, leaving the inky stains of the news on his hands with every shift.
A Milwaukee-area native, Diedrich somewhat randomly enrolled in a journalism class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee his freshman year and said he was soon enamored by pace and variety of the job, and most of all by the chance to share people's stories.
So, let's get to know Journal Sentinel reporter John Diedrich:
I get the opportunity to delve deeply into subjects, spending months to document how people are being harmed, who or what is responsible and how it might be fixed.
My days vary. On some, I go through tips from readers like you and call back folks. Other days, I work with government employees to get data or craft the top of a story. On the best days, I am out talking to people, like Fiesha Parker, whose son was accidentally shot; like Chuck Lovelace, a Park Falls gun store owner helping fellow veterans struggling with mental health; and like David Tate, whose sister, Tiffany, suffered a stroke next door to Froedtert Hospital but because of a little-known policy was turned away and died.
The Journal Sentinel is a special news organization because of its commitment to investigative journalism. It has been so since I came back to Milwaukee in 2004 and the commitment remains. I feel blessed to be able to work here and do what I do.
I wrote a bit for my high school newpaper (Wauwatosa East '88). Results were iffy.
My first reporting job was at the Oak Creek Pictorial, as a part-timer while in college. I still have the printout of an article from my editor, Lorraine, marked generously with her red grease pencil. Then I did internships at the Journal and the Sentinel (pre-1995 merger) and then it was off to my first full-time reporting job at the Kenosha News.
I had written about guns for years but I tried a different approach when I was awarded the O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University. I spent almost all my time talking to gun owners about why they owned firearms and their ideas to prevent the misuse of them.
I found that suicides account for 71 of 100 gun deaths each year in Wisconsin and there were grassroots as well as government-led efforts to reduce them that hadn't gotten much attention. We changed that.
This year, I continued the project, now focusing on accidental shootings of children. I found that parents in these incidents are often charged with felony child neglect in Milwaukee County, while in other counties they are more often charged with misdemeanors or not at all.
The response has been powerful and positive. I often started interviews by asking people about when they first shot and why they own a gun today. Those stories were always rich and made it into the articles.
I have received many positive comments from gun owners and in fact I have been invited to speak to people like Cam Edwards, who has a podcast on gun issues.
Boy, that's a tough one. The stories all have had deeply powerful moments, when I could sense what I think of as the spirit of truth guiding the interviews and pointing me to where the reporting should go.
This story comes to mind. I was sitting with an Army sergeant in Fallujah, Iraq, on May 1, 2003. That day then-President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" regarding the war in Iraq. With a grimy face fresh off a harrowing patrol, this sergeant looked at me and said, "I don't know what they are selling back home but this thing is far from over." I felt the responsibility then and now, to carry such messages to those in power.
I have to be careful not to disclose too much to protect my source. But I once got a report leaked to me about government malfeasance by having it left in a plastic grocery bag, hanging on the handle of my front door at night. It felt like something out of the Watergate stories.
I enjoy reading, composting, backyard fires, riding my mountain bike, being active in our church and checking out new restaurants with my wife, Raquel. We have two grown sons and two dogs, Easy and Fern.
John Diedrich is an investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He can be reached at jdiedrich@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Q&A: Investigative reporter John Diedrich, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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He can be reached at dclarey@ This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee commission has strong support for police chief's reappointment
