Milwaukee Press Club

Journalists to Discuss Crime Coverage in Milwaukee
Sponsored by the Milwaukee Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists

Feeding the Media Beast: Crime Coverage in Cheese Country,² featuring a panel of Milwaukee area journalists and former Milwaukee County Dist. Atty. E. Michael McCann, will be held at 7 p.m., Thursday, February 28, in Room 103, Johnston Hall, Marquette University. The hall is located at 1131 W. Wisconsin Ave.

Moderated by Tony Anderson, managing editor of the Wisconsin Law Journal, the journalists will discuss how crime coverage is handled in Milwaukee; challenges facing journalists in reporting crimes; dealing with law enforcement personnel, court officials and the legal community; and whether or not too much emphasis is spent on crime coverage by the media.

The session is sponsored by the Milwaukee chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and hosted by the Marquette University Department of Journalism and its student SPJ chapter. The program is free and open to the public. A question and answer session follows the panel remarks.

The panel includes:

* John Diedrich, federal reporter at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who covered the Milwaukee Police Department and first exposed the beating of Frank Jude, Jr., by officers. He and the paper's medical writer teamed for a groundbreaking series revealing the full extent and impact of gun violence in the city.

* Tom Held, general assignment reporter The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who had covered the hunter slayings near Rice Lake, the murder of a school principal in Weston and last autumn¹s massacre of six young people by a police officer in Crandon. He also covered the Jeffrey Dahmer story for the old Milwaukee Sentinel and was the lead police reporter there from 1989 to 1994.

* Martin Hintz, author of ³Got Murder? The Shocking Story of Wisconsin¹s Notorious Killers² (Trails/Big Earth Publishing, 2008). The book covers Julian Carlton, murderer of seven people in 1914 at Frank Lloyd Wright¹s Taliesan complex, plus Ed Gein; Jeffrey Dahmer;Terry Ratzmann, who massacred seven worshippers at a Brookfield church service in 2005; and other Wisconsin murderers.

* E. Michael McCann served as the elected District Attorney of Milwaukee County for 38 years (1968-2006). He retired from public service in January, 2007, at which time he joined Marquette University Law School as a Boden Teaching Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Law. One of the more prominent cases that occurred during McCann'sdistinguished career as district attorney was the prosecution of Milwaukee serial slayer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Originally published: Monday, February 25, 2008

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