It’s been a glorious year for the UW. In August, Jennifer L. Mnookin assumed the role of chancellor, bringing new ideas and energy to campus. Badger men’s basketball won a share of the Big Ten championship, with Greg Gard honored as Coach of the Year and Johnny Davis x’24 as Player of the Year. UW–Madison continued its streak of stratospheric rankings among institutions of higher education — 20th nationally and 27th in the world, according to the Center for World University Rankings.

It’s been a good year for On Wisconsin, too. We won the gold award for best magazine from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), competing against alumni publications from the world’s other top universities. We also won three CASE awards for writing and design, along with three more from the Milwaukee Press Club in a contest for all Wisconsin newspapers and magazines. Our goal is to be a first-class publication worthy of a first-class university, and we’re proud to add our awards to the UW’s other honors in 2022.

More than prizes, of course, we care about pleasing our readers. A recent readership survey found engagement at an all-time high, with 90 percent reporting that On Wisconsin strengthens their connection to UW–Madison. To make the magazine even more appealing, we’ve improved our print design over the past year, with a web redesign scheduled for 2023.

We hope you’ve had a good year as well, and we look forward to celebrating the UW’s 175th anniversary with you in 2023. Who knows what glories lie ahead.

Burruss was inspired to pursue a career as a sports reporter by football Saturdays at Camp Randall and buzzer-beaters at the Kohl Center. Courtesy of Sherree Burruss

Sherree Burruss ’12 was a young teenager visiting a museum in down-town Chicago when the seed of her future career was planted. Burruss’s eighth-grade class was touring the Chicago Museum of Broadcast Communications when their guide pointed to a small, simulated news desk and said, “Does anybody want to try anchoring?”

Burruss raised her hand. “I read the prompter,” she says. “A little fake anchor read.” The tour guide said, “That was good. Have you ever thought about this as a career?”

“No,” Burruss replied. “I will now.”

Burruss refined her goal while studying journalism and strategic communications at UW–Madison. It wasn’t a classroom revelation, but rather experiencing football Saturdays at Camp Randall and buzzer beaters at the Kohl Center that inspired her. Burruss wanted to report sports.

“It was that game-day atmosphere,” she says. “The passion Wisconsin people had for it and how smart they were as fans. I try to bring that to what I do now. I know there are fans watching, and I’m their voice.”

Burruss currently reports and anchors for CBS Interactive, the CBS Sports Network, and CBS-TV and has worked as a sideline reporter for the network’s major college and NFL football coverage. The sideline role, she says, is “much harder than I ever imagined. It’s like an iceberg — the amount of work you see is the tip. There’s so much more that goes into it.”

Burruss’s first broadcasting job was at the ABC affiliate in Columbia, Missouri. She also met her husband, David Cruse, there; they now have a young daughter. Burruss’s rapid professional ascendency included sports reporting and anchoring jobs in Atlanta and Washington, DC. She credits a fellow Badger at NBC’s DC affiliate, photographer Chris Kerwin, with helping her advance. “He was my rock,” Burruss says, “working with me on my scripts. He helped me get where I am now.”

The job includes, of course, being in the public eye. Burruss laughs recalling a grocery store checkout clerk in Columbia who recognized her and said, “You’re getting better.”

“People are pretty honest when they see you out,” she says. “But I love it. I think I’m approachable.”

Since its founding in the 1970s, Isthmus has attracted innumerable UW grads looking to develop original voices. Bryce Richter

For more than 40 years, Isthmus owned Thursdays in Madison. When a new issue of the alternative weekly newspaper hit the racks, it was an event. UW students pored over the arts coverage while strolling down State Street. Bus riders consumed the latest cover story en masse. By Monday, well-thumbed copies littered downtown sidewalks and Memorial Union floors.

That tradition ended abruptly in March 2020. The free paper lost its chief revenue source when advertising evaporated amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The company dropped its print product, and editor Judith Davidoff MA’90 and owners Jeff Haupt’95, Mark Tauscher ’99, MS’03, and Craig Bartlett pondered the idea of a world without Isthmus.

No one was willing to let that happen — not Davidoff or, it turned out, Madison residents. A small staff continued publishing articles on Isthmus.com while transitioning to a nonprofit structure. Donors stepped up, fans bought memberships, and, against all odds, Isthmus returned to print as a monthly in August 2021.

Why all the fuss about this publication with a funny name? When Isthmus appeared on the isthmus in 1976 — part of a national alt-weekly movement that included the Village Voice, Chicago Reader, and LA Weekly — it promised a new approach to local journalism. The independent publication focused intensely on Madison, searching for stories and subcultures the mainstream media had missed. At its best, it showcased idiosyncratic columnists, erudite arts critics, fearless news reporters, witty illustrators and photographers, and feature writers eager to experiment with new narrative approaches. These included scores of talented UW interns who went on to national careers — and even Pulitzer Prizes, like Anthony Shadid ’90, Richard Winton MA’91, and Abigail Goldman ’92.

Cofounder Vince O’Hern provided freedom for self-expression, and that was enough to keep freelancers and staffers (including me) on board for ages. Isthmus attracted innumerable UW grads looking to develop original voices, such as Mike Baron ’71; Dylan Brogan ’09; Catherine Capellaro ’89; Dave Cieslewicz ’81; Aaron Conklin MA’93; Melanie Conklin MA’93; Jack Craver ’10; Phil Davis ’76, MA’81; Nada Elmikashfi x’18; Linda Falkenstein ’83; Maureen Gerarden MA’81; Jason Joyce x’92; Raphael Kadushin ’75, MA’78; Susan Kepecs ’74, MFA’77, MA’88, PhD’99; Kristian Knutsen ’01; Paul Kosidowski MA’86; Tom Laskin ’82, MA’85, MA’93; Stu Levitan JD’86; Elizabeth McBride MS’78, MA’88; Maureen Mecozzi ’94; David Medaris ’82; cofounder Fred Milverstedt ’69; Doug Moe ’79; Andy Moore’86; Brent Nicastro ’77; Steve Paulson MA’83; Jay Rath ’85; James Rhem MA’71, PhD’79; Ann Shaffer MA’90; Robin Shepard PhD’93; Jessica Steinhoff ’01; Paul Stroede MFA’94; Eric Tadsen ’93; David Tenenbaum MA’86; Candice Wagener ’99; and Mike Wilmington x’74. The publication’s devotion to capturing the unique local vibe endeared it to readers, even as seismic changes in the industry felled one competing weekly after another.

And now, Isthmus has survived the latest earthquake. As the paper proudly proclaimed in August, “Thursdays are a thing again.”

“I only got one small grant,” recalls Kim, a UW–Madison journalism professor. But she made good use of it, developing an innovative digital tool that tracks ads on social media.

With this new software in hand, Kim landed a second, larger grant from UW–Madison’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education. She used the funding to launch her study of the 2016 election, and her alarming findings made headlines.

As outlined in her 2018 paper, “The Stealth Media? Groups and Targets behind Divisive Issue Campaigns on Facebook,” Kim and her research team confirmed that the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency and other suspicious groups had been spreading disinformation and running divisive issue campaigns on social media to influence the election. And the malfeasance hit close to home: “Divisive issue campaigns clearly targeted battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where traditional Democratic strongholds supported Donald Trump by a razor-thin margin.”

Since that report, Kim has emerged as a leading expert in digital disinformation campaigns. Her findings were reported by hundreds of national and international media outlets, and her paper received the Kaid-Sanders Award for the best political communication article of the year by the International Communication Association. She was invited to present her research at congressional briefings, and she testified at a Federal Election Commission (FEC) hearing.

For her landmark study, Kim recruited about 9,500 volunteers — a representative sample of the United States voting population — to install her ad-tracking app on their computers. The software would capture ads posted to Facebook and send them to the research team’s servers. Between September 28 and November 8, 2016, the volunteers saw $5 million in paid ads on Facebook.

Her study, says Kim, was the “first large-scale, systematic empirical analysis” that investigated who operated political campaigns on Facebook and who was targeted by these campaigns.

It was a stressful investigation, with Kim hitting dead ends along the way. But she stuck with it, using an impressive set of detective skills to follow a trail of confusing data — until a lucky break helped her expose a threat to the very heart of our democracy.

“Did I Mess Up?”

Kim had for years been studying what she calls “passionate publics,” people who care strongly about an issue based on their identity or values. Think gun rights activists and abortion opponents. She hypothesized that these groups would be the ones running targeted ads on social media during the 2016 election, but she was not seeing many ads from the usual suspects. “There must be something wrong,” she recalls thinking. “This is a half-a-million-dollar project. Did I mess up?”

At the same time, Facebook was full of ads from groups she had never heard of. “I was having a heart attack,” she says. “I’d been studying advocacy groups and grassroots groups, but I didn’t recognize any of these.”

Adding to the stress was the content of the ads, which Kim found very depressing.

“I’m a first-generation immigrant, and there were a lot of anti-immigrant groups,” says Kim, who was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea.

Once the researchers were able to identify a name associated with a digital ad, they tried to match it with data from the Federal Election Commission, but they found few filings for these political actors. The same was true when they tried to cross-match through the Internal Revenue Service database; more than half of the sponsors of ads they identified were not in either database.

“There was no public footprint, and they existed solely on Facebook,” Kim says. “We didn’t know what to do with these groups. … It was almost like forensic research to find out who these people were.” But Kim and her team would soon get the break they needed.

In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released a group of ads generated by Russian actors along with the account names that they had used on social media. “We matched that information with our data,” she says. “We found that 17 percent of suspicious groups turned out to be Russian actors. They posed as American grassroots groups.”

Kim says it’s scary to consider how these groups are able to disguise themselves and evade detection. “I’m an expert, and I was not sure who they were. … For regular people, the names are generic or very similar to well-known groups.

“People are exposed to thousands of ads and think they are legitimate domestic groups,” she adds. “That is very problematic.”

The fact that some of the ads were Russian-linked sparked a childhood memory, something she had not thought about for a long time. Kim was five or six when she found a flyer on the street that turned out to be propaganda from North Korea, likely dropped from a balloon. The flyer claimed North Koreans were better off than their southern neighbors.

Kim developed a love of democracy as a child in South Korea. Courtesy of Young Mie Kim

Kim says the groups planting deceptive ads on social media have similar goals to those that dropped propaganda pieces on the streets of Seoul: “They use hatred and social divisions and then target the most vulnerable people and push their buttons.”

Big Questions

After a brief welcome to the 19 UW students attending her Zoom class on April 21, Kim laid down the rules for debate. Three teams would argue for and three against resolutions related to disinformation on the internet. Then there would be a five-minute evaluation period, at which time the debaters themselves would leave the class. The students were instructed to evaluate their classmates on how strong their arguments were, how they used evidence to back up their arguments, and how well they performed.

Anna Elizabeth Aversa x’22 was up first, charged with making the argument that the government, rather than tech companies, should regulate disinformation on the internet.

Drawing on sources included in the course, Dis/misinformation in the Age of Digital Media, Aversa argued that the internet is often used to manipulate audiences and that disinformation is a threat to our democracy.

“Without a doubt, disinformation online is out of control,” she said. Tech companies, she added, “don’t have the resources or the desire to regulate this.”

Next, Rielle Schwartz ’21 performed the cross-examination.

“Although misinformation is a key issue right now, I don’t believe government surveillance would be the best option,” she countered. “How would government regulation change behaviors that are inherent in human behavior? Shouldn’t [the government] be putting more money and effort into media-literacy programs?”

The students also debated whether tech platforms should take down election disinformation or be required to make the methods they use for targeting users publicly accessible.

Aversa appreciates that Kim wants her students to be part of the solution to the evolving issue of digital disinformation. “Professor Kim encourages all her students to think creatively about future steps,” says Aversa. Kim is the type of professor, she adds, who “doesn’t just lecture or put up slides, but rather engages with her students and values the input they bring to class.”

None of the questions debated by the students has an easy answer, but Kim’s research deeply informs her recommendations for reform.

She believes that government officials should play a role in regulating the internet and enact policies relating to disinformation. But, she adds, “Those policies should not be about censorship. They should be about transparency and accountability.”

Kim also believes that ad disclaimers — statements appearing on communications that identify who paid for them and whether they were authorized by a candidate — are key.

While broadcast ads require identification, digital platforms have been exempt from these rules since 2011. But since evidence emerged of foreign interference on these platforms, the Federal Election Commission has been reconsidering the issue. Kim testified before the commission in July 2018 as it was considering rule changes that would require disclaimers on some online political ads.

In comments to the FEC prior to her appearance, Kim argued that a healthy democracy depends on the ability of voters to make informed decisions. Political ads, she said, provide voters “substantive information” on issues and candidates, and campaigns use these ads to persuade voters, raise support, and mobilize voter turnout.

“Disclaimers hence provide voters necessary information about who is behind the political advertising and who is trying to influence their voting decision,” she said.

The FEC still has not taken action on the issue of disclaimers. But there has been some progress on individual platforms. Both Facebook and Google started to require “paid for by” information on ads they accepted in the summer of 2018.

And both platforms now have libraries that collect their ads. Facebook touts theirs as providing “advertising transparency by offering a comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads” running across Facebook apps and services. And for ads that are about issues, elections, or politics, the Facebook ad library also provides information on “who funded the ad, a range of how much they spent, and the reach of the ad across multiple demographics.”

Kim acknowledges that Facebook is better than it was in 2016 in dealing with disinformation, but she is not entirely satisfied with its regulatory policies. One problem is that there is no consistency across tech platforms on the definition of a political ad.

The federal government needs to step up, says Kim, and establish guidelines “so we can see clear definitions across platforms of political advertising, disinformation, and voter suppression.”

The Essence of Democracy

Kim says a love of democracy drives much of her research.

As a child, she heard stories from her parents about the Korean War and lived through political turmoil herself, including pro-democracy protests while she was a student in the 1990s at Seoul National University. Growing up, she thought of the United States as the essence of democracy and transparency.

Kim says she developed a more nuanced view of the U.S. once she moved here for graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She received her doctorate in communications in 2004, with a specialization in political communication and new communication technology.

There came a moment in her graduate school career when Kim and her Korean female friends were debating whether they would enter the job market in the States or return to Korea. “We were joking that it was a decision between ‘Are you going to stay and deal with racism or go back to Korea and deal with discrimination as a woman?’ ”

By fall 2004, she was an assistant professor at Ohio State University. Four years later, UW–Madison came calling. The timing was right for her suitors to show off the campus and the lakes.

“It was April,” she says, laughing. “I immediately fell in love with the city.”

Prescription for Change

After her groundbreaking study of the 2016 election, Kim continued researching digital political ads placed in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. She found that Russian trolls were up to their old tricks and getting “even more brazen in their tactics,” as she wrote in a March 2020 report for the Brennan Center for Justice, where she is an affiliated scholar. Posing as Americans, including as political groups and candidates, these Russian-linked actors tried to sow division by targeting people on both sides of the political divide with posts intended to stir outrage, fear, and hostility. And they had another goal, Kim wrote. “Much of their activity seemed designed to discourage certain people from voting. And they focused on swing states.”

She found the trolls had gotten more sophisticated, closely mimicking logos of official campaigns. And instead of creating their own fake advocacy groups, now they were appropriating the names of actual American groups. The issues raised in the ads, however, remained largely the same: race, patriotism, immigration, gun control, and LGBTQ+ rights.

Kim ends her analysis with a prescription for change. She says tech platforms need to do better at detecting shell groups and fake accounts; federal lobbying legislation needs to be amended to apply to foreign influences working in the digital area; and the FEC must establish a clear and consistent definition of political advertising so that individuals, law enforcement, and researchers understand what is happening in the world of digital political advertising.

Without safeguards like these, she warns, “Russia and other foreign governments will continue their efforts to manipulate American elections and undermine our democracy.”

Charting New Territory

Kim has continued to mine the data she collected from the 2016 and 2020 elections, moving beyond identifying ads and their targets to what impact they had.

In one analysis, she looked at whether ads aimed at keeping people away from the polls in 2016 achieved their intended effect. She matched the ads with the people exposed to them and then looked at whether they voted in the presidential election.

Turnout among all individuals who saw these ads, regardless of demographics, “significantly decreased,” says Kim. More importantly, voter suppression ads clearly targeted nonwhite voters in battleground states. Consequently, turnout among these voters decreased even more.

The report, which has not yet been published, is once again charting new territory. “This is going to be the first study that demonstrates the impact of this targeted voter suppression,” Kim says.

And it could be important for moving the needle. Causation is difficult to pin down in social science, notes Kim, and without a clear link, regulatory changes tend not to happen.

In May, Kim received a notification that someone from Saint Petersburg, Russia, had tried to access her personal Instagram account. She reached out to Instagram’s cybersecurity area, and the issue is under investigation.

It’s not the first suspicious activity to involve her circle. The Twitter account of her research team, Project DATA, was hacked right after publication of “Stealth Media,” though it’s unclear whether it was by a Russian actor. The personal Facebook page of Kim’s former research assistant was hacked at the same time.

Kim does wonder whether her focus on disinformation and foreign interference puts her at any personal risk. She says her parents would like her to change focus.

But she gets much satisfaction out of knowing that she is increasing public awareness of a crucial issue. She has received lots of emails and notes from strangers thanking her for her work.

While Kim spends a lot of time immersed in the world of social media for her research, she has little interest in these tech platforms for personal use.

“I don’t understand why people reveal everything on social media,” she says. “And I know the dangers.”

Kim says colleagues at conferences ask for her Twitter account, which, especially for younger academics, is today’s business card. They don’t know what to say when she tells them she doesn’t have one.

“They are frozen,” she says, laughing. •

Kraft (right, with community organizer Sami Saadi) has hard conversations about identity, politics, and government policies. Courtesy of Hadassah

When podcast host Dina Kraft ’93 goes on location, she never knows what sound bites she will capture. “I have chased after a bleating goat in a Bedouin village and tried to get close enough to record a Jewish oud player crooning classic Arabic love songs,” she says.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Kraft tracks down stories the media generally overlook. Her podcast The Branch, sponsored by the Jewish women’s organization Hadassah, gives voice to Palestinian/Israeli friendships, recording stories of Arabs and Jews. Each episode tells the story of a different pair who work together — from peace activists on the Gaza–Israel border, to a soccer captain and coach in the Galilee, to the team who launched a chain of ice cream shops that offer “a corner of delicious sanity.”

Despite the new round of hostilities in recent months, Kraft remains as committed as ever to highlighting stories of unlikely friendships.

“The partners I’ve interviewed who are closest, across the very real divides that would otherwise keep them apart, are the ones who do not shy away from having hard conversations about identity, politics, and government policies,” she says. “They share a profound respect for one another, even when they don’t agree on everything.”

When Kraft was earning her bachelor’s degree in history at UW–Madison, she loved working at the Badger Herald. “It was a great way to learn more about what made Madison the unique place it is,” she says.

A longtime foreign correspondent, Kraft has reported from South Africa and Pakistan for the Associated Press and written for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Currently, she is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Kraft was a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and received the 2020 B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem Award for Journalism.

Kraft also hosts another podcast, The Patient Is In, sponsored by StuffThatWorks, an AI-based crowdsourcing format that features conversations with people navigating chronic illness. So how does an award-winning print journalist make the switch to audio?

“Like everyone else on the planet, it seems, I’ve gotten bitten by the podcast bug,” says Kraft. “Even before podcasts became a thing, I had a serious crush on audio. I love its sense of immediacy and intimacy. I have learned that capturing the pitch of someone’s voice, the peal of their laugh, the way they speak to a colleague, helps reveal their character. And all of this has made me a better, more attentive journalist.”

Manu Raju ’02 is on live television, audibly out of breath, as he’s being escorted alongside other members of the press corps by Capitol Police to a secure and undisclosed location. It’s January 6, 2021, and one sign that something surreal is happening is the slightly shaken voice of a normally composed CNN reporter. He knew it was serious when he received an email from police three hours earlier with an “internal security threat” warning and directions to lock down and remain quiet.

Raju, 41, had arrived at the U.S. Capitol to cover the certification of electoral college votes in Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump for the presidency. What’s typically a formality turned into a deadly affair when a violent mob of Trump supporters rushed the building and interrupted the proceedings. Throughout it all, Raju did what he does every day on Capitol Hill: talked to sources and reported breaking news on TV, Twitter, and CNN’s website.

“It was so chaotic, and people were glued to their phones,” Raju says. “A lot of people in the Capitol told me that they were relying on my tweets. They didn’t have the TV on because they were hiding under their desks, or they were in shelter, and they did not want to draw attention. We pushed out as much information as we could.”

He adds: “I reflect back on that day, and I often think that I had no idea how much danger we were in.”

Raju, whom CNN promoted to chief congressional correspondent in January, has covered politics in Washington for nearly 20 years. He’s reported on presidential impeachment trials, Supreme Court nominations, key Senate races, and government shutdowns. He also tracks the obscure machinations of an increasingly contentious Congress — a flood of motions and amendments, committee hearings and legislative debates, filibusters and vote-a-ramas. To stay on top of it all requires remarkable skill and stamina.

The job also requires thick skin. A president famously labeled Raju’s network “fake news” and even “the enemy of the people”; a senator insulted him in the halls of Congress. On January 6, a haunting phrase was carved on a door of the Capitol: “Murder the media.”

But Raju has always stayed above the fray, which has earned him widespread trust and admiration from colleagues, politicians, and sources of all stripes on Capitol Hill.

“He is indefatigable,” says Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief. “And this may sound cliché because people talk about hardworking reporters, but he really is the hardest-working reporter on Capitol Hill. And I think that almost everybody who knows him will agree.”

Raju’s meteoric rise in Washington — from a rookie policy insider to one of the nation’s most visible reporters — traces back to an unconventional start at UW–Madison.

An Unusual Beat

Raju works for a 24/7 news operation, and his routine reflects it. “My day starts the moment I wake up,” he says.

He begins answering emails around 6 a.m. There’s an eight o’clock conference call with his news team, and he joins a larger editorial meeting at nine. By the time he arrives at the Capitol and checks the schedule for the Senate and House of Representatives, he’s developed a plan — “a roadmap in my mind,” he says — for the stories he wants to cover and the sources he needs to interview.

At times, the mapping is literal. Raju could make a detective blush with his ability to track the movements of members of Congress, learning their preferred routes from offices to committee hearing rooms to legislative chambers. If he intercepts them — and if they’re willing to talk, which is never a given — he only has a few minutes to extract something newsworthy. “You need to be prepared,” he says, referring to not only the questions but also the fact that he may need to ask them at a near jog.

“Covering Capitol Hill is an unusual reporting beat,” says Feist, who oversees Raju’s work. “You don’t sit at a desk like you might at the White House or the Pentagon, and you don’t sit in a newsroom. You literally work the halls of Congress, and he does that better than anybody.”

In 2017, Raju’s hallway interview with Bob Corker dominated a news cycle and sparked a war of words between the former Tennessee senator and President Trump. “When [Trump’s] term is over, I think the debasing of our nation, the constant non-truth-telling, just the name-calling … will be what he’ll be remembered most for,” Corker said. The six-minute interview marked one of the first public fractures between Trump and a Republican member of Congress.

“Some people see that kind of reporting as performative, but I do not,” says Kathleen Bartzen Culver ’88, MA’92, PhD’99, the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at UW–Madison. “Trying to get statements from politicians in the moment is a critically important part of congressional reporting, because otherwise, we’d be left with canned statements during hearings and in press releases.”

When Raju gathers a new piece of information, he sends a quick note to the network. If it’s important enough, he’ll be asked to report it on air immediately and field questions from CNN’s news anchors. He shares many of the same scoops on Twitter and holds other information for online stories.

His personal rule for sharing news across platforms is consistency. Some political reporters let loose on social media, but Raju’s Twitter feed is one unending string of straight reporting. You’ll find neither personal commentary nor cat photos.

“I don’t say anything on Twitter that I would not say on TV or I would not report online,” he says. While the approach isn’t sexy, it’s earned him a massive reach — more than half a million followers on Twitter alone.

With his thoughtful reporting, Raju has developed a thick Rolodex of sources, ranging from aides to politicians themselves. The key, he says, is maintaining their trust.

“The big thing is to never surprise them,” he adds. “When there’s a story that may reflect poorly on them or their bosses, you have to tell them ahead of time and give them enough time to respond before you report it.”

His relationship with sources allowed him to report with certainty on January 22 — three weeks before the eventual vote — that there wouldn’t be enough Republican support to convict President Trump on the latest article of impeachment.

“At the time,” he says, “people were looking at me, saying, ‘Are we leaning too hard into this?’ And I was like, ‘I’m telling you, I’ve spoken to everybody — nothing is going to change here.’ ” He was right.

Raju’s workday doesn’t end until the work of Congress ends. And during marathon events like an impeachment trial or the deliberation on landmark legislation, that means he doesn’t leave the Capitol until late at night or early the next morning.

“What keeps me motivated is the desire to tell people something they don’t know,” he says. It’s a journalistic urge that he discovered at the UW — while studying business.

An Unconventional Path

Raju is the son of Indian immigrants. His grandfather, Gopalakrishna Adiga, was a pioneer of modernist poetry in India. Raju’s family compares his work, in the native language of Kannada, to that of T. S. Eliot’s in the West.

Raju grew up in Darien, a small suburb of Chicago, where his father worked as a doctor at the University of Illinois–Chicago Hospital. “Growing up with a family of immigrant parents, they really instill in you hard work and work ethic,” he says. “They were never fully satisfied.” But they let Raju and his older brother pursue whichever careers most interested them. For a young Raju, and for no particular reason, it was business.

Raju chose to attend the UW after a stroll through campus. When he discusses his college years, the solemn tone of a TV newsman fades and a warm, lighthearted, humble personality emerges.

His older brother covered sports for a college newspaper at the University of Michigan, so Raju decided to do the same, just for fun. He applied to the Badger Herald, and the sports editor, Dan Alter ’99, assigned him to cover men’s hockey practice the next day. After a few quick pointers from Alter (including to always carry two pens), the future TV news star finished his first story. “I really had no idea what I was doing,” Raju recalled in an essay after he won a Forward under 40 Award from the Wisconsin Alumni Association in 2018.

During his time on campus, Raju worked for student radio station WSUM and became more involved at the Badger Herald. He rose to be the paper’s sports editor during the glory years of Wisconsin men’s athletics — two Rose Bowl victories and a Final Four appearance in basketball. He landed a summer internship with NBC in Los Angeles and later NBC15 in Madison.

By the time he graduated from the UW, Raju knew that he wanted to pursue journalism despite his degree in business administration. But his foray into politics — much like his introduction to journalism — was largely happenstance.

A Rise through Washington

Raju’s parents had moved to Washington, DC, while he was in college. When he graduated, he decided to move in with them and search for jobs in the area.

He caught his first break covering pollution control for Inside EPA, a trade publication for environmental policy wonks. (One report: “EPA Review of Flame Retardant Risks Will Affect U.S. Stance on EU Ban.”) A few years later, he started to write for Congressional Quarterly on the energy beat, where he first cultivated sources on Capitol Hill.

Raju could deftly translate technical policy into understandable terms. The Hill newspaper recognized his skill and hired him in 2007 as a Senate reporter. A year later, he left for a national audience at the all-digital Politico, where he wrote for seven years and became an award-winning senior congressional reporter. His versatility across media platforms and range in policy and politics opened doors at CNN.

While at Politico, Raju was frequently booked by CNN for guest appearances. “It was very clear, even then, that Manu Raju was one of the best correspondents covering Capitol Hill,” Feist says. “When we had an opportunity to hire a congressional correspondent, he was at the top of our list.”

After Raju joined the network in 2015, he was soon met with one of his biggest challenges yet: a public distrust of national media.

A “Fake News” World

A tried-and-true tenet of journalism is not becoming part of the story. In January 2020, Raju couldn’t avoid it.

During a routine hallway interview, he asked then–Arizona senator Martha McSally whether the Senate should consider new evidence that arose during the first Trump impeachment trial. She snapped: “Manu, you’re a liberal hack, and I’m not talking to you.” The interaction was caught on camera and exploded on social media. McSally promptly fundraised off the incident and sold “liberal hack” shirts.

Raju’s colleagues and competitors rallied to his defense. Geraldo Rivera defended him on Fox News. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell wrote on Twitter, “I’ve never see[n] a senator treat a reporter like this. Manu Raju is one of the best congressional reporters I’ve ever seen, including my years working in the Senate. I’ve never detected a hint of liberalism or partisanship from [him].”

Raju handled the incident with typical aplomb. “The people who are coming after us and calling us names are trying to influence how we report the news,” he says. “But my philosophy is to ignore it, endure it, and report factually based on what we know.”

Feist says Raju was simply doing his job — asking tough questions of those in power. “Manu is about as apolitical a person as I know,” Feist says. “He doesn’t pick sides.” That was true when Raju asked Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, about her and President Trump accusing each other of hate. “Are you serious?” she responded. “What is wrong with you?”

Politicians attacking journalists is a trend that concerns Culver, who serves as director of the UW’s Center for Journalism Ethics. “Manu Raju is trying to represent the public interest and hold people accountable,” she says. “And anyone who wants to subvert that and call him an enemy of the people or a liberal hack — I’d like to know what their replacement system is. The news media are a systemic check on government power in this country. If you don’t want someone like him doing his job with care and consideration, then how is the public represented?”

Many polls suggest that trust in national media is at an all-time low. Last year, a Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans have little to no trust in mass media to report the news “fully, fairly, and accurately.” A Pew Research poll found that CNN is trusted by 70 percent of liberal Democrats but only 16 percent of conservative Republicans.

Culver notes that distrust in cable news networks likely stems from their increasing reliance on pundits to fill around-the-clock airtime. Viewers may struggle to separate opinion coverage from the news operation.

She also points to the “hostile media phenomenon.” Researchers have found that even when they create a perfectly neutral news text (affording equal prominence to conservative and liberal sources), partisans view it as biased against their views.

“So you could be the ideal neutral news reporter — much like Manu, who does not bring a lot of emotion into his interviews and is very straightforward — and people will still see you as hostile to their views,” Culver says. “What’s important for us as citizens in a democracy is to focus less on whether an outlet is biased against what I think and instead ask, ‘When was the last time I opened my mind about what I think?’ ”

The Next Story

Raju considers himself a family man. Aside from following Chicago and Badger sports, he dedicates nearly all of his off hours to raising five-year-old twins with his wife, Archana, who serves as vice president of marketing and business strategy at a national cloud and data center company. When he’s not covering an all-encompassing event, he spends the entire weekend with them.

Other than that, he says, “I’m always working on and thinking about the next story.”

Madison is never far from his mind. If you’ve watched CNN over the past year, you’ve likely spotted a red Terrace chair in the backdrop of his at-home interview setup. His Twitter bio concludes with the phrase Wisconsin Badger for life.

“There’s no question if it weren’t for my time there, I would not be where I am today,” he says. “I love the University of Wisconsin. It’s like home to me. I love Madison. There’s really no other place I’d rather be.”

For now, Madison will have to remain his home away from home. There’s much more work to be done in Washington.

“The good thing about being at a place like CNN is that it’s a huge network with lots of opportunity to grow,” Raju says. “But I’m happy with what I’m doing now, so we’ll just see what happens in a few more years.”

He pauses for a few seconds — notable only because he so rarely does it.

“If I can survive this pace.” •

By Jenny Price ’96

As the death count from COVID-19 began to rise across the country last spring, Peter Coutu ’18, a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot, earned a somber nickname from a reader: the Grim Reaper.

Coutu reported early on in the pandemic about potential problems stemming from the region’s lack of hospital capacity, which struck the reader as being somewhat alarmist. Coutu wasn’t deterred. He continued to tally new cases and share his findings with readers via a daily tracking website, even sending additional information to readers who asked for it. He also investigated the state’s low rate of testing and the issues exacerbating the spread of cases in nursing homes.

“I try to run at every story like the information can be lifesaving,” Coutu says.

The stakes have never been higher for media outlets to find a way to keep going. Conventional wisdom had written print journalism’s obituary many times over before the pandemic, as revenues declined and outlets changed owners or shut down entirely. Experienced editors and reporters took buyouts and were not replaced. And polls showed Americans had lost trust in the news media over concerns about bias and accuracy.

But there are signs of hope for journalism, starting with a 2018 Gallup poll that found that almost 70 percent of those who have lost trust say it can be restored with accuracy, lack of bias, and transparency. In recent months, websites for local newspapers and larger media outlets like the Washington Post drew more readers following the arrival of the pandemic in the United States, according to a New York Times analysis. And an Associated Press poll last spring found that more than two-thirds of Americans trust information from the news media about the coronavirus outbreak either “a moderate amount” or “a great deal.”

If trust in the news media is poised to make a comeback, it will germinate in the daily work of local journalists. Their ranks include recent UW–Madison graduates using skills they developed in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication that hold the promise of preserving their rapidly evolving profession’s essential role in a democracy.

“A lot of people think this generation of 20-year-olds is a selfie-addicted, social-media-loving, vapid group of people,” says Kathleen Bartzen Culver ’88, MA’92, PhD’99, an associate professor and director of the UW’s Center for Journalism Ethics. “That is not who shows up in my classrooms. That’s not who’s out in these newsrooms.”

LESSONS IN TRANSPARENCY

In the months after a city employee killed 12 people and wounded four others at a municipal building in Virginia Beach in May 2019, the Virginian-Pilot staff debated the value of follow-up stories. Some readers thought the newspaper was milking the incident.

Nevertheless, Coutu says he felt responsible for investigating complaints about a toxic work culture in city government. “You don’t want to come across as passing the buck for who’s responsible for the shooting, because obviously the shooter is,” he says. “At the same time, what I’ve heard from experts on this subject of workplace violence is that it’s key to really interrogate these things, because it can lead to more incidents in the future.”

Coutu developed his approach to handling sensitive stories during his undergraduate studies at the UW, where he was a reporter for the Daily Cardinal. With help from Culver, he learned how to get on sources’ wavelength and make his intentions clear. “It makes sense that some people don’t want to talk to the media, and they are going to be a little bit upset if you reach out,” Coutu says. “I’ve tried to just be as explicit as possible when communicating why I’m reaching out and what’s the point of the story.”

Culver says this approach — transparency — is essential to building trust with readers. “We need to do more to say why we make the choices that we make, because what seems completely normal to you inside the newsroom feels abnormal to people on the outside,” she says.

WHAT JOURNALISM DOES WELL

In recent years, there’s been a push for change like this across the profession. “I think there’s mystery about how we go about our work. Let’s just be more transparent about how we pursued the story,” Washington Post editor Marty Baron noted in 2017 at an inaugural ethics summit hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

For the last four years, Culver has done her part to transform the practice of journalism, putting on what she calls a “road show” focused on truth and trust. She delivers this talk mainly in community centers, churches, and libraries. She focuses on how the future of journalism depends on reporters being more accountable, defending the value of their work, and engaging more with audiences. She cites a Gallup poll in which 71 percent said a commitment to transparency is very important, alongside accuracy and an unbiased approach.

“I’ve never seen a more important time for journalism ethics, and I’ve never seen stronger ethical practice among the group of individuals like these [recent journalism school graduates],” she says.

Culver’s public talks explore people’s distrust of the news media. Frequently, she says, it arises from their assumptions about liberal or conservative bias. In response, she points to media’s important role in reporting on topics like money, security, and health. Culver thinks health stories, in particular, exemplify the valuable service that local journalism provides, such as reminders about when to get the flu shot or availability of COVID-19 testing. “That’s the kind of thing that journalism does well but doesn’t get enough positive attention for,” she says.

ACCOUNTABILITY MATTERS

In her role as a health and science reporter for the USA Today network based in Appleton, Wisconsin, Madeline Heim ’18 (a former On Wisconsin intern) received positive and negative feedback in equal measure in the first few months of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Her reporting included stories about the state’s testing capacity, how the pandemic could affect pregnant women and accommodations for people with disabilities, and advice from epidemiologists on how people could guard against exposure to the coronavirus during ongoing public protests against police violence.

“I routinely get pushback saying that I don’t write about the ‘positives’ enough,” Heim says. “I try to respond to most negative emails I get. Usually, people don’t write back. But sometimes they do, and sometimes that can start a good dialogue.”

Before COVID-19, Heim covered stories ranging from how farmers are dealing with climate change to whether local retailers were selling liquid nicotine — better known as “vape juice” — without federally required child-resistant caps. She also reported on the revelation that Ascension Health, which operates clinics in Wisconsin, shared the personal health records of millions of Americans with Google.

Most of the calls and emails Heim received in response to the Ascension story were positive, but one woman called to accuse her of fearmongering. The caller said a nurse at her local clinic insisted they did not share patient data. Heim took the time to explain the release happened at the national level, and that’s why the nurse may not have heard
about it.

Culver is greatly encouraged by Heim’s approach. “It should make us very optimistic, because the news media ultimately are accountable to the public,”
she says.

And Heim’s work demonstrates the benefits a single journalist can bring to a community. “Sometimes it’s exhausting and heartbreaking. Other times I can see that I’ve made a difference, and that feels good,” Heim says.

THE STORIES NO ONE TELLS

During her six months as a digital producer for WTMJ in Milwaukee, Alexandria Mason ’17 worked at a breakneck pace to mine police reports, tweets from public officials, and other sources for her stories. It was her first job after finishing her undergraduate studies at the UW and graduate school at the University of Southern California.

Mason experienced firsthand how much viewers rely on local news. She fielded between 15 and 20 calls a day, answering questions about weather-related school closings and even Green Bay Packers scores.

Last year, Mason moved on to Black Nouveau, a monthly news program on Milwaukee PBS. She uses her reporting skills to find stories about African Americans that don’t usually find their way to the nightly newscasts. “Young Black people turn on the news and see a lot of people who look like them in mugshot form,” says Mason, who is African American. “We don’t see a lot of positive stories.” As a Milwaukee native, she knew there were other narratives to show viewers. In recent months, she’s covered a fellowship program for young Black men to bring more of them into early childhood education jobs and profiled Corey Pompey, the first Black director of bands at UW–Madison. She also previewed an art exhibit that paired portraits of African American and Latino men with their own words imagining their lives beyond stereotypes.

“When you’re talking to more underrepresented groups about really sensitive issues, it’s hard to get people to put their stories forward and just be completely open and honest,” Mason says. “I hope for future stories that I can continue to connect with people and show myself as a credible reporter and producer who’s not trying to make a gimmick out of their experience.”

After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Mason began work on a miniseries highlighting young people finding their voice in the burgeoning protest movement. When COVID-19 hit Wisconsin, she worked on stories about its impact on the community, particularly the disproportionate numbers of African Americans getting the virus.

She produced a piece on a Milwaukee church partnering with Khris Middleton of the Milwaukee Bucks and several Black-owned restaurants to feed hundreds of families in need. And she interviewed the owner of a once-bustling nail salon to show the effect of closures on Black-owned businesses.

“It’s a responsibility I take very seriously,” Mason says. “I think this pandemic feels a lot scarier than those of the past because there’s really no escaping the information overload. Everyone has a platform and a theory and in some cases a conspiracy. So the best I can do is make sure I’m providing accurate information on whom this pandemic is impacting and who is working to help.”

THE KEY TO THE FUTURE

Early in the spring semester — two months before Marquette University shut down in response to the coronavirus outbreak — 22 students crowded around a conference table in an advanced reporting class. Their professor, Dave Umhoefer ’83, is a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for local news reporting at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Umhoefer joined the faculty as director of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism in 2017.

He reminded students that the national media would descend on Wisconsin in the summer as the battleground state planned to host the Democratic National Convention. But Umhoefer didn’t want his students to follow the lead of countless reporters who would have dropped into — and just as quickly dropped out of — the same barbershops and diners to extract quotes from residents. Instead, he tasked them with looking at the presidential primary through the eyes of potential voters in predominantly African American and Hispanic Milwaukee neighborhoods where turnout was high in 2008 and 2012 but shrank in 2016.

He stressed that his students could only build credibility with local residents and political organizers by going back multiple times to speak with them to understand what’s motivating voters.

Umhoefer told students to be respectful and thoughtfully approach people in communities where they have no existing relationships. This is not a discussion that would have taken place in the Journal Sentinel newsroom just a few years ago, says Umhoefer, who was 23 when he began working for the newspaper. “We came out of the ivory tower, and we did what we did,” he says.

The students adapted to working remotely once they scattered back to their hometowns, interviewing their newly developed sources about their preferences and enthusiasm for the November election and uncovering perspectives that might not have been shared otherwise.

“I think the mainstream media have to be better at connecting with people on their terms, not us dictating what kind of stories we think are important to them,” Umhoefer says. “It takes more effort. And the idea is, you get a much deeper story and then you can come back and do another one, because you weren’t there just as a one-off. You’re building a reputation as somebody who cares about getting the full story and treating people with respect.”

Culver agrees that local news organizations should invest time and energy into getting their reporters out into communities, but she emphasizes that readers and viewers must understand those efforts cost money, especially when outlets have been hit hard by the pandemic and some are already shuttered.

“We are following this pandemic globally, but we are living it locally. I think that’s why we see both traffic and trust ticking upward in some polls,” she says. “Local news outlets should be investing in practices that we know build trust. But all of us should be investing in the community news that we need now more than ever.”

So goes the lede in Larry Sloman’s 1975 article for Rolling Stone, written just three years after he’d graduated from the UW with a master’s degree in sociology. Over the ensuing decades, Sloman has continued to chronicle counterculture milestones with uncommon panache as a reporter, ghostwriter, and all-around character. As seen in the Netflix documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, Sloman, embedded as a reporter on the singer-songwriter’s 1975 tour, earned the nickname “Ratso” from Joan Baez because he reminded her of Dustin Hoffman’s hustler in Midnight Cowboy.

After writing On the Road with Bob Dylan, Ratso went on to coauthor bestselling memoirs by Howard Stern and Mike Tyson. Distinguished by his six-inch goatee and raspy New York accent, Sloman occasionally works as an actor and has appeared in such movies as the 2019 indie thriller Uncut Gems. Last year, the Queens-born hipster released his debut album, Stubborn Heart, at the age of 70.

Looking back on his eclectic body of work, Sloman credits the UW as a formative influence. “Madison was a lot of fun,” he says. “I gravitated immediately toward criminology and deviance, which really informed what I do, because everything I’ve written about is to some extent filled with deviant subject matter.”

Supported by a full scholarship, Sloman showed up in Madison in August 1970, the day before Sterling Hall was blown up. “Coming from New York, you think you’re at the epicenter of the antiwar movement,” Sloman says. “But my first night in Madison, I heard this loud bang and thought it must be a car backfiring. I wake up in the morning and see the paper: the Army Math Research Center had been bombed. That was my introduction to Madison.”

A few days later, Sloman talked his way into becoming music editor for the Daily Cardinal. He interviewed a wide array of artists, including Liza Minnelli and Merle Haggard.

In late 1972, he and jazz musician Ben Sidran ’67 launched the late-night show The Weekend Starts Now on Madison’s NBC affiliate. The live broadcast featured C-grade horror movies and weekly “sermonettes” delivered at three in the morning by “the Reverend L. J. Sloman.”

“I wore a straw hat and a clerical collar over a Hawaiian shirt,” Sloman says, laughing. “I’d sell condos in the Holy Land, crazy stuff like that.”

Left to right: Playwright-actor Sam Shepard, Larry Sloman, Bob Dylan, and cinematographer David Myers confer in 1975 on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, during which they were filming the movie Renaldo and Clara. Ken Regan

After earning his master’s, Sloman moved back to New York, where he shared an apartment with folksinger Phil Ochs while filing freelance articles for Rolling Stone. One afternoon in 1974, he spotted Bob Dylan behind the wheel of a car parked in front of an Elizabeth Arden hair salon. “I go over to him and say, ‘Hi Bob, my name’s Larry, and I’m a writer for Rolling Stone.’ Immediately, Dylan’s wary, throwing me this attitude, so then I said, ‘By the way, I’m Phil Ochs’s roommate.’ And Dylan just melts.”

Dylan warmed to Sloman’s subsequent review of Blood on the Tracks. One year later, Sloman showed up at an after-hours jam session in Greenwich Village where Dylan and his entourage were testing out songs for the impending Rolling Thunder Revue tour. As dawn approached, Sloman recalls, “We all got into this cherry-red Cadillac 1973 convertible. Besides the fact that he had numerous drinks, Bob is not a very good driver to begin with, so we’re swerving all over the Village. We wind up at the Kettle of Fish [bar], and Bob says to me, ‘Why don’t you cover the tour? I’d rather have you do it than anybody else.’ ”

Describing his rapport with the famously press-shy Dylan, Sloman says, “I think one of the reasons Bob appreciated me is that I had that New York swagger, that New York attitude. On the tour, I’d tell him, ‘Come on man, you’re just a Midwest Jew. You’re not a real New York Jew like me.’ And he loved it!”

Following the publication of his Dylan book, Sloman penned a history of marijuana culture called Reefer Madness, then cracked open a new chapter of his career by ghostwriting Howard Stern’s 1993 memoir, Private Parts, and its sequel, Miss America.

“Here’s a guy who’s so brash and confident behind the mic, and such a brilliant interviewer, yet he was really insecure and had a lot of issues,” Sloman says. “We included a lot of personal stuff in the second book, like his obsessive-compulsive disorder. Howard is just as much a neurotic Jewish workaholic as I am. And he deserves every ounce of success he’s achieved.”

Sloman went on to write a Harry Houdini biography before embarking on an especially memorable collaboration with boxer Mike Tyson that yielded the 2013 bestseller Undisputed Truth.

Sloman (left) poses with Emily Jillette, boxer Mike Tyson, and magician Penn Jillette. Sloman collaborated on an autobiography and a memoir with Tyson. COURTESY OF LARRY SLOMAN

“He had such a great story, from rags to riches to rags again,” says Sloman. “When Mike was in prison, I mailed him a copy of Nietzsche’s autobiography Ecce Homo.” Years later, Sloman flew to LA and pitched his ghostwriting skills to Tyson, now out of prison. “The meeting’s over, I’m halfway out the door, and Mike calls out, ‘Ratso, did you send me that Nietzsche book because you thought I was Superman?’ I said, ‘No Mike, I sent you Ecce Homo because it helped me through some tough times, and I thought it might help you.’ And he goes, ‘Thank you, Ratso!’ That’s when we bonded.”

After spending most of his career telling other people’s stories, Sloman found his own voice as an artist a couple of years ago when he started writing songs with Brooklyn musician Vin Cacchione and singing them in the studio. “My idea was to do a tribute album to myself, featuring my famous friends. Never in a million years did I think that I would be the vehicle for these songs.”

Sloman changed his mind after he brought the demo to his friend Hal Willner, whose producing credits include Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and Lenny Bruce.

“I go to Hal’s studio and say: ‘Tell me if I should be singing this song?’ I play it for him. Hal lies back, eyes closed. Song’s over, he opens his eyes, leans forward, and goes, ‘What are you waiting for?’ I took that as a yes.”

Sloman’s career has spanned reporting, ghostwriting, and acting. In 2019, the Queens-born hipster released his debut album at the age of 70. William Beaucardet

This year, Sloman has played his singer-songwriter role to the hilt while promoting Stubborn Heart. He performed on the Outlaw Country Cruise in the Bahamas alongside Kris Kristofferson and Lucinda Williams. There’s more to come, if Sloman has his way.

“It’s not like I’m going to be Adele or anything,” he muses. “But if I can just keep putting out albums and having fun, I’d love to keep doing it.”

That motto underscores Greenberg’s longevity as “The Travel Detective” in an industry increasingly saturated with dilettante bloggers. Every year, the multi–Emmy Award–winning journalist racks up 450,000 airline miles and logs six intense training sessions in an aircraft simulator so he can be an authoritative voice for audiences. He reaches them via his radio show (Eye on Travel), books, CBS News reports, and PBS television shows (including The Travel Detective with Peter Greenberg). “I’m an investigative reporter,” he says, “and I’m applying my reporting techniques to the largest industry in the world.”

“I Wrote the World’s Worst Story”

Travel came naturally for Greenberg. At six months old, he became the first member of the American Airlines Sky Cradle Club when he flew with his mother on a DC–6 from New York to Los Angeles to visit his grandfather, an executive with Douglas Aircraft Company. At age 12, he took his first grand tour through Europe.

Journalism, on the other hand, came by accident. After arriving at UW–Madison from his home in New York City in 1967, he was afraid he’d get lost on such a big campus. “Someone told me, ‘Join a fraternity or join the school newspaper,’ ” he recalls. That’s how he found himself at the offices of the Daily Cardinal on October 18, 1967, the day students protested the presence of recruiters from Dow Chemical, which made napalm during the Vietnam War. The event is considered a turning point in the antiwar movement for mobilizing college students nationwide. The university called in the Madison police, who beat and forcibly removed protesters and used tear gas on students.

“At the Cardinal, there was tear gas and broken glass everywhere,” Greenberg remembers. “I walked in [innocently] going, ‘I’d like to join the paper.’ They said, ‘Great. Cover this.’ ”

It was Greenberg’s first byline — not his best, he admits. “I wrote the world’s worst story, trust me, but they had no choice but to run it on the front page. The next morning, I woke up in my dorm, and everyone was saying, ‘Hey, saw your story!’ I thought, ‘You saw that? I think I’m going to like this.’ ”

By the time Greenberg turned 19, Newsweek had hired him as a campus correspondent. At 20, he was promoted to a regular correspondent (the youngest in the magazine’s history) to cover stories around the country in between exams. “I embraced the philosophy of Mark Twain, who said, ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with my education,’ ” Greenberg says.

That was the case in 1969, when Greenberg was in Washington, DC, covering a major antiwar protest and received a phone call from a classmate. “He told me, ‘Your final project for Radio, TV, and Film is due at 1 p.m. tomorrow,’ ” Greenberg recalls.

Greenberg found a way. He wrote a script for a 30-minute show on WHA-AM on his flight back to Madison. After landing at 9:40 a.m., he scrambled to line up a production staff, ran to Rennebohm Drug Store to make photocopies of the script for everyone, and then recorded and submitted the show. By 4 p.m., he was on a flight back to Washington to continue covering the march.

The Savvy Traveler

After graduating, Greenberg worked for Newsweek as a West Coast correspondent, reporting on subjects ranging from the Patty Hearst kidnapping to the Rolling Stones. As in his grandfather’s day, California was still a hub for aviation. “It dawned on me very early in my career that no one was covering the process of travel and transportation,” he says. “So in addition to covering crime and music, I developed travel as a beat.”

That beat went on, even after he left Newsweek to produce movies and television shows for Paramount and MGM. While he was busy developing such TV blockbusters as MacGyver and thirtysomething, he still wrote a weekly syndicated travel column called The Savvy Traveler, which appeared in 60 newspapers nationwide. A colleague at Paramount was a fan of the column; he launched Greenberg from behind the scenes to in front of the cameras by hiring him as the travel editor of ABC’s Good Morning America. Greenberg has since performed that role for three major broadcast networks over the past 30 years.

He’s been along for the ride as the travel industry migrated online. Reservations, reviews, and a ride from Point A to Point B are available at the click of a button. The mix of people traveling internationally has changed, as millennials prefer to spend money on experiences rather than material goods and the growing middle classes in China and other developing countries explore beyond their borders.

Greenberg has helped his readers understand these changes. “I called myself the Travel Detective because I wanted people to realize I wasn’t promoting anything — I was presenting,” he explains. “There’s a huge difference. I am sharing insider information that is a meaningful takeaway for them. It’s not enough to point out a problem if you don’t tell someone the solution, too.”

An Enthusiastic Companion

Greenberg’s deft mix of authority and affability serves him well not only in times of a travel crisis, such as covering the Miracle on the Hudson for NBC’s Dateline (which earned the network an Emmy), but also in lighthearted moments, including his radio report on the stinkiest cheeses in Paris. When he invites viewers to join him at the start of each show, you can tell he is sincere, an enthusiastic travel companion who simply wants you to see what he is seeing. “He has this amazing capacity to relate to human beings better than anyone I ever met,” says Jack Cipperly ’62, MS’64, PhD’68, a longtime assistant dean in the UW’s College of Letters & Science who has been friends with Greenberg since his days at the Cardinal. “He is remarkable at meeting people and earning their trust so they confide in him. It’s perfect for his profession.”

That skill is the key to the success of Greenberg’s television series The Royal Tour. In each episode, a head of state serves as a tour guide for Greenberg and his viewers. “The beauty of this show is that it humanizes the country and its leader, whether you like or agree with him or not,” he explains. “At its heart, it’s just two guys on a road trip.”

For the series, Greenberg has swum in a cenote (sinkhole) with former Mexican president Felipe Calderón, hiked to see mountain gorillas with Rwandan president Paul Kagame, and ridden on camels with King Abdullah II of Jordan. In Israel, he played soccer at an Arab-Israeli club with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — until, that is, Netanyahu tore a tendon. Production stopped immediately. But for Greenberg, there’s always a way. He shifted his attention to other projects and enjoyed some rare down time at home on Fire Island, New York, where he serves as an active volunteer firefighter. Finally, Netanyahu healed. Greenberg then returned with his crew to film take two of the Israel royal tour.

Greenberg has racked up a lifetime tally of 22 million airline miles and counting, but those miles are not the sole measure of his career. The U.S. Travel Association inducted him into its Hall of Leaders, the single highest honor for an individual in the travel and tourism industry. The recognition placed him in the company of such luminaries as Walt Disney and J. W. Marriott. “Quite frankly, I was surprised by it,” Greenberg says, “because you get those kinds of awards right before you go to the nursing home. It’s great to be in that company, but I wasn’t ready to go [into retirement] then, and I’m still not ready to go.”

Carney as Bigfoot: “I absolutely believe he exists, even if it’s only in our collective imagination of him.” Jake Holschuh

Investigative journalist Scott Carney MA’04 believes in Bigfoot.

Well, sort of.

The myth of the legendary primate is the topic of Wild Thing, a podcast executive-produced by Carney and hosted by his wife, former National Public Radio editor Laura Krantz. Through nine episodes, Krantz lays out her path to Bigfoot, starting with when she discovered long-lost relative Grover Krantz, a famous Bigfoot researcher and anthropologist. Following in Grover’s footsteps, Laura dives into sightings, evidence, and why people want to believe in the beast.

Now well versed in Bigfoot lore, Carney (shown above impersonating the hairy creature) says he’s a believer in his own way.

“I absolutely believe he exists, even if it’s only in our collective imagination of him. He absolutely has a real-world effect. Whether or not he’s an unknown or undiscovered primate, that’s up for debate.”

As executive producer, Carney says he served as Krantz’s consultant and promoter, supporting her along the way and helping pitch the show to potential advertisers. The podcast has been a success, with some 2 million downloads and a peak of number seven on the iTunes podcast charts.

It’s also opened up the imagination of skeptics, Carney says.

“The most energizing comments are the people who went from ‘I was a total nonbeliever’ to ‘Now I think it might be out there, there’s a chance,’ ” he says. “The only people who didn’t like it were some people who were [already] really into Bigfoot.”

Sasquatch may seem like a bizarre subject, but the podcast fits the rest of Carney’s work, which dives into climbing mountains without a shirt (What Doesn’t Kill Us), fatal cults (The Enlightenment Trap), and the world’s human organ market (The Red Market).

Varied as they seem, Carney says, these topics all share a common thread — the question of what it means to be human. “It’s been this question that’s sort of run through everything I’ve ever done,” he says. “I try to take unusual and [participatory] angles in trying to answer this.”

The couple’s next podcast is in the works already, and Carney recently completed the manuscript for his sequel to What Doesn’t Kill Us. Finding more wacky, out-of-the-ordinary topics isn’t the hard part, he says.

“The real problem is deciding which story to pursue.”