2024 Award Winner

Andy Hall and Dee Hall

Wisconsin Watch

Two “titans of the nonprofit news industry” and pioneers of state-based nonprofit news are being honored for their service and impact: Andy Hall and Dee Hall. The Halls, who founded Wisconsin Watch, “have made enormous contributions to the greater nonprofit news sector,” according to a nomination letter from some of the publication’s current and former leaders. 

The Halls are investigative reporters who started Wisconsin Watch in their family basement, launching the publication in 2009. This summer, they left the outlet they started and built into a successful news organization. They recognized the growing organization’s changing needs, the nomination letter says, and “as a result, Wisconsin Watch is thriving under new leadership.” 

Andy Hall, Wisconsin Watch’s former executive editor, was responsible for the news outlet’s journalistic and financial operations since it launched in 2009. Andy served on INN’s membership standards task force from its beginning in 2009 until very recently, and through that work has guided INN’s vetting of hundreds of nonprofit news organizations.

Dee Hall, former managing editor of Wisconsin Watch, was responsible for its daily news operations. Dee is now INN member Floodlight’s editor-in-chief and has continued to support INN by editing various collaborative series and projects led by INN’s collaborations team. 

Wisconsin Watch “has grown from an initial budget of $160,000 to a nearly $2 million operation employing two dozen people” under Andy Hall’s tenure. Dee Hall has served “as editor and reporter on more than 70 award-winning projects recognized in state, regional and national contests,” the nomination letter states. “She also taught a popular University of Wisconsin-Madison investigative reporting class that collaborated with Wisconsin Watch on high-impact projects.”

The Halls led Wisconsin Watch through significant challenges that included launching during the Great Recession, a failed 2013 attempt by the state legislature to evict the news outlet from its University of Wisconsin-Madison offices, a 2019 major water pipe burst that forced the publication to find temporary quarters, the COVID-19 pandemic, and managing a rapidly growing staff and budget, the nomination letter states. And, the letter continues, “throughout it all, they stayed true to their guiding principles: Protect the vulnerable. Expose wrongdoing. Explore solutions.”

Now, “Wisconsin Watch is on firm footing as it faces the future. There can be no greater testament to one’s service to the nonprofit news world than spending 15 years building an organization into an institution and then letting it go.”