We believe in transparency, so here is a thorough bio of our co-founder, Jessica McBride, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, journalist.
Who Is Jessica McBride, Wisconsin Journalist?
- Jessica McBride is a Wisconsin-based, national award-winning journalist and educator who is known for her impactful investigative and independent journalism.
- Her reporting has been repeatedly recognized as the best journalism in the state of Wisconsin by the Milwaukee Press Club and Wisconsin Newspaper Association.
- She received, with Wisconsin Right Now, co-founder Jim Piwowarczyk, gold awards for the best public service, news, and investigative reporting in the State of Wisconsin from the Milwaukee Press Club.
- Since 2020, when it was founded, Wisconsin Right Now has also won awards for podcast (Ron DeSantis interview that broke national news), photojournalism, column writing, video, and critical review writing. She won many WNA awards in the past for her journalism.
- Jessica McBride was a general assignment and crime and Milwaukee police reporter for a decade for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin’s largest daily newspaper), and she was a columnist and City Hall reporter for the Waukesha Freeman newspaper.
- She has written for many publications during a career spanning more than 25 years in journalism, including Milwaukee Magazine, El Conquistador Latino newspaper, and national sites. She is a guest host on WISN 1130, and she was a fill-in editor for Patch news sites.
- You might see her as a crime journalist on Investigation Discovery Channel shows (like Ice Cold Killers), History Channel Gangland or Oxygen Channel Snapped.
- She wrote a book on the Steven Avery case. For the past 21 years, Jessica McBride has taught journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was honored for teaching excellence, having won the university-wide UWM Alumni Foundation’s teaching excellence award for media innovation and for her work championing additional voices in the media.
- Jessica McBride covered the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks from lower Manhattan for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (she spent the night in a firehouse near ground zero) and the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor from Hawaii. For Wisconsin Right Now, she reported on the scene as Kenosha burned and Louisville rioted; covered the Mayfield, KY tornado in person (with live standups on national TV); was a few feet from a shooting covering crime on Water Street; covered Haitian immigration from the ground in Springfield, OH; and reported on the border crisis from Cochise Co, AZ. She does local small business profiles.
Jessica McBride, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Journalism Teacher and Educator
- Jessica McBride recently supervised college student major journalism projects on the ground in Pacific Palisades and Paradise, CA (wildfire); North Carolina (Hurricane Helene); Puerto Rico; the Bakken region of North Dakota (oil); the Bayou country of Louisiana (a vanishing island of a tribe); Port Arthur, TX (Hurricane Harvey); Washington DC (aftermath of Parkland, FL); Lime Springs, IA (election aftermath); New Bedford & Gloucester, Mass (fishing industry); Lac du Flambeau barricades; Somali immigration to Barron, WI; Flint, MI (water crisis); Leo Burt mystery; Waco, TX (investigating a death); data centers; missing Milwaukeeans and indigenous women. We covered the border from both Eagle Pass TX and Piedras Negras, Mexico. “My student and I drove down a weed-covered path along the Rio Grande – on the Mexican side of the border – until we found people to interview (the student in Spanish),” she says.
- “My students found the final missing photos of Wisconsin Vietnam War service members whose names are on the DC wall for a major national project (VMF Wall of Faces), and I helped find Minnesota’s. We also preserved the stories of the final living Holocaust survivors in Milwaukee County. There were 20 a couple of years ago; many passed now. Living angels; best humans I ever met,” she adds.
- Jessica McBride obtained or helped obtain grants for these trips, helped conceive them, and helped fund most of them out of my own pocket so students could go. They get students marquee clips and life-changing journalistic experiences, not to mention awards.
- Jessica McBride created her program’s first online newspaper (UWM Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies), brings in grants, serves on committees, funds student NABJ and NAHJ memberships, and her students have won dozens of prestigious awards, including National Society of Professional Journalists awards for the best college journalism in the country, beating out the Ivy League.
- A student assignment in her class was turned into a multi-million-dollar Super Bowl ad. She teaches investigative and news reporting for starters. Her opinions are my own and don’t represent UW-Milwaukee. She believes instructors should keep their politics out of the classroom. “I find helping our talented students very rewarding,” she says.
Wisconsin Right Now and Jessica McBride
- Jessica McBride and James Piwowarczyk created Wisconsin Right Now, an independent news source, in 2020 to report the stories that the legacy media censor, twist, or simply miss. “We don’t print what we can’t prove, and we have rattled the feathers of Republicans at times when warranted, as well as Democrats,” she said.
- “I recommend you seek out multiple news sources – us, liberal sites, legacy media, talk radio, social pages, conservative sites, etc. You get something different from each. I read many. I remember when Milwaukee was a 2 newspaper town. More news sources is better. Hopefully, you learn something from us and each other,” Jessica says.
- Jessica McBride is an independent; she has never belonged to a political party.
- Jessica McBride and Jim Piwowarczyk won public service awards for a story documenting that the attorney general Josh Kaul so botched a federal audit response into crime victim services that Wisconsin was named a high-risk grant state (he stalled their open records request for 1.5 years); for an investigative piece exposing the Evers’ admin’s systemic failure to notify victims and their families of paroles; and for their in-person ride along coverage of the Cochise Co. AZ sheriff’s border patrols.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel & Jessica McBride
- Jessica McBride won a national investigative reporting award for a series on prison deaths while at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and too many other awards to count. Wisconsin Newspaper Association and Milwaukee Press Club. She has presented at the Wisconsin Newspaper Association on journalism. She won the Milwaukee Press Club’s first statewide blogging award, and awards for background/interpretive reporting, magazine writing, feature writing, investigative reporting, spot news, etc. dating back years.
Jessica McBride Personal Biography
- Jessica McBride’s father is a professor of screenwriting and film historian/author who was a reporter and film critic (he wrote a movie with the Ramones), and her grandparents were Milwaukee newspaper reporters. “My grandma helped integrate the Milwaukee Press Club, which didn’t allow women into the 70s. I used to look at her press passes in their dusty Wauwatosa attic; they only let her cover Rose Kennedy, First Ladies and how the legislature affected women. Grandpa’s byline was in the old Milwaukee Journal for the first time in 1928. He was a police rewriteman and columnist,” she explains.
“My mother was a kindergarten teacher, and I grew up in northwestern Wisconsin (Ladysmith, Sheldon), raised by an impoverished teenage mom who made $10,000 a year with no child support (my dad left for LA when I was 2, and I rarely saw him.) But I guess I got his craft. Writing is the air I breathe. I have a master’s degree in Mass Communication,” she added.
“Journalism is evolving. The internet giveth and taketh away; so does social media and so will AI. Everyone is figuring this out in real time,” McBride says. “I am fascinated by new media formats. I remember how consolidated the media used to be. Growing up, I got the news from NBC, the Ladysmith News and St. Paul Pioneer Press. That’s it. The internet didn’t exist. I have always embraced new media formats while wedding them with old-school journalistic techniques and rigor,” she added.
- She lives in Wisconsin and was born there.
“You can always count on the fact that I will give it to you straight, and we don’t print what we can’t prove.”
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