The Recombobulation Area is a six-time TEN-TIME Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication written and published by veteran Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. Learn more about it here.
The Recombobulation Area is the winner of four awards from the Milwaukee Press Club in its 2022 Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism competition.
Of those, the publication was honored with the gold award for “Best Blog.”
The Recomboulation Area also won silver for “Best Column” and for “Best Hard Feature Story” for the story “Bird on a Wire” on LuAnn Bird’s remarkable and unconventional campaign for Wisconsin State Assembly. Read that story below.
The Recombobulation Area also won bronze for “Best Public Service Story or Series” for our multi-part series on every election on the ballot in the Wisconsin State Legislature. Yes, all 116 races. Read that series below.
The Gridiron Awards Dinner honored Anna Wolfe as this year’s Sacred Cat Award winner for her coverage of poverty and economic justice for Mississippi Today, including uncovering a welfare scandal involving now-former Mississippi governor Phil Bryant and former Packers Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. Wolfe was also honored with a Pulitzer Prize this week.
The event also gave Headliner Award honors to Derek Mosley, former Milwaukee Municipal Court judge and current director of Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, and George Stanley, former former editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and regional editor of USA TODAY Network Wisconsin.
A the full list of winners in all categories is available here.
These four awards make it a total of ten Milwaukee Press Club awards that The Recombobulation Area has won in three years. That now includes two gold awards.
Last year, the “Expanding the Divide” series won three awards, including the publication’s first gold award, for Best Multi-Story Coverage of a Single Feature Topic or Event. In the 2020 awards, The Recombobulation Area won three, including Best Column.
In a more than a decade in journalism in Milwaukee, Dan Shafer, founder of The Recombobulation Area, has won 17 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards, including five gold awards. Along with the ten for The Recombobulation Area, awards were won while on staff at the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine and ThirdCoast Digest.
The Recombobulation Area is a weekly opinion column and online publication covering news and politics in Milwaukee and Wisconsin.
Launched in 2019 as a part-time project by veteran Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer, who was a stay-at-home dad at the time, The Recombobulation Area has grown considerably over the last few years, reaching thousands and thousands of readers with each newsletter and reaching millions on Twitter. Shafer began operating the publication as a full-time small business in 2022.
The Recombobulation Area is completely independent and is funded by readers who subscribe right here on Substack. We’re really, really proud of that.
That means you are the reason our award-winning journalism is possible. We can’t thank you enough.
So, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! You are making this possible and you are making a difference as we continue to upend the political media landscape in Wisconsin. Let’s keep building, and let’s keep recombobulating.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s also written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He’s won 17 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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#BucksInSix
Well done! Congratulations!