2025 Columns – Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council

February: How cost is used to deny access to records

February 3, 2025February 3, 2025Bill Barth

There’s good news and bad news in a recent Wisconsin Court of Appeals decision upholding an open records judgment related to the ridiculous and ham-handed investigation into alleged 2020 election fraud headed by former Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman. On the good news side, the appellate court upheld a lower court ruling that the state […]

January: Protect the press against frivolous lawsuits

January 2, 2025January 2, 2025Jim Malewitz

Shereen Siewert, publisher of the Wausau Pilot and Review, has been breathing easier these days. In September, a Wisconsin appeals court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of state Sen. Cory Tomczyk’s defamation lawsuit against Siewert, the nonprofit newsroom she founded in 2017, and one of its reporters. The ruling, which Tomczyk did not appeal, ended […]