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Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Get to know education reporter Rory Linnane
Rory Linnane's journalism career launched in high school, where she was on the staff of the Shorewood Ripples. Her work at the student newspaper, fighting for information to be more accessible to those most affected by it, shaped her approach to covering education today. Linnane is in the midst of the O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, reporting a project focusing on Milwaukee Public Schools. (Her work is overseen by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editors; O'Brien officials have no role in the editing or presentation of the work.) More: Milwaukee Public Schools saves millions leaving positions unfilled. Students pay the price. I grew up in Shorewood and graduated from Shorewood High in 2008. Thanks to a strong student newspaper, the great Shorewood Ripples, I knew I wanted to head directly for the journalism school at UW-Madison. After college, I got a job in the Communities section of the Journal Sentinel for a couple years, mainly covering Wauwatosa. I then landed a statewide reporting position at the Appleton Post-Crescent, where I led a series on youth mental health. Finally, I got a job at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I started in the Ideas Lab, then applied for the education reporting job when it opened up in 2020. I owe it all to the experiences and mentors I had through my high school student newspaper. The staff adviser, English teacher Mike Halloran, adamantly protected our autonomy as student journalists to cover any topic without censorship. Between chronicling our sports teams with the gusto of Packers writers, we welcomed opinion pieces on global politics. We covered school board meetings, and we wrote editorials that challenged school policies. In addition to sparking my interest in journalism, my experiences at the student newspaper made me passionate about all students having the power to produce autonomous journalism, build student movements and shape the institutions that ultimately impact them more than any adults. I'm surprised that after a decade in journalism and four years in education reporting, I still feel like a beginner. Every day, I learn something new that I can't believe I didn't know. Between the bleeding of local journalism jobs, the proliferation of public relations professionals who shield school officials from our questions, and the general inscrutability of school budgets and metrics, it's hard to see how busy families can be expected to meaningfully engage in budget and policy discussions, or even make informed decisions on what schools to attend. In the last four years, I've witnessed how voids of information can lead to booms and busts of public attention. Some are choreographed less by local realities and more by talking points on national news programs. Others rise and fall when there's a crisis, sending reporters chasing school board members for answers one month and leaving an empty boardroom the next. It's a sign that we need more accessible information and meaningful engagement all year round. When I tell people I write about schools, people are often surprised that there's enough to write about. In fact, there's never enough time in the day to cover all the strong story ideas that come our way. Earlier this month while on a tour at Washington High School, I saw five things I wanted to write about: the orchestra teacher who said it's the first time after many years that the school was able to offer orchestra; the Black and Latino Male Achievement coordinator who showed us the hygiene bags she packs for students; the group of 70 men who want to volunteer as mentors at the school; the parent coordinator who makes home visits for students failing classes; and the computers set up in his room for parents to use for job searches. The hardest part of my job is deciding how to triage the numerous worthy happenings and tips that readers send us. I don't always get it right. (But please, keep sending those tips!) About a year ago, a few colleagues and I started talking about what we could do as a newsroom to support high school students who are interested in journalism. Many journalists in our newsroom were deeply influenced by exposure to the field in high school. We believe every student should have those opportunities – and the future of our industry depends on it. We set up four free opportunities for students: being paired with a mentor, having a journalist come speak at their school, visiting our newsroom for a field trip, and job-shadowing. I'm proud of how many of my colleagues have volunteered their time to make this possible; we've already connected with over 30 schools. In a full-circle moment last month, the student editors of Shorewood Ripples reached out about scheduling a field trip. Two crises erupted at Milwaukee Public Schools last summer. In both cases – the finance office bungling key accounting reports, and the district's Head Start program losing funding and folding – there had been early warnings about understaffing in critical areas. With understaffing a seemingly districtwide issue, it begged the question: Are there other departments on the verge of crisis, or undergoing a quieter crisis? Families and staff had already been sharing anecdotes about understaffed schools: losing a music teacher, going without a librarian, seeing a special education teacher strained with an untenable caseload, having a math class taught by a remote teacher. There's no regular public accounting of vacant staff positions. While school districts are required to report staffed positions to the state Department of Public Instruction, they don't report unfilled positions. Before starting this project, I'd never seen a list of vacant positions at MPS. If there is a full list, I still haven't seen it, but I'm working to piece together the full picture. I hope my reporting contributes to a public understanding of the true staffing picture at MPS. Where there are students who aren't getting the attention and learning opportunities they deserve, I hope my reporting helps our city and our state find solutions. Catch me three times a week taking advantage of the offerings of Milwaukee Recreation. Some favorite classes of seasons past include natural dyeing in the spectacular weaving center at Gaenslen, a meditative swim class (shoutout H2Flow), reflexology, pickling and landscape painting. May we all aspire to have the range of the MKE Rec course catalog. Rory Linnane can be reached at This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Meet Rory Linnane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Yahoo
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@ This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Q&A: Investigative reporter John Diedrich, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
