WISCONSIN CITIZENS MEDIA COOP

Authentic news. Locally grown.

Wisconsin Citizens Media Cooperative is a group of citizen journalists who began covering the Wisconsin Uprising in February, 2011. We came from different walks of life, different professional backgrounds and different parts of the state to document the dismantling of democratic process and tradition taking place in our state under the rightwing onslaught of the Scott Walker regime.

During the course of 2011, we discovered that our individual photographs, videos, and blogs were becoming trusted sources of information for events taking place in and around the Capitol. In the fall of 2011, we began meeting informally to discuss collaborating on stories. Walker’s Department of Administration’s new rules restricting freedom of expression and freedom of assembly in the Capitol were unveiled in December 2011 and formed the stimulus we needed to launch a formal media organization.

In January 2012 we incorporated as a non-profit worker cooperative in the state of Wisconsin. Currently, we are all unpaid volunteers engaged in this work out of our fierce determination to inform the public about the dismantling of the decades-long tradition of open government and participatory democratic structures in Wisconsin.