Wisconsin Watch’s model of nonprofit journalism is simple: We give it away.
Anyone is free to republish our work using the “Republish” button found on our original content and following our republication guidelines. Media organizations can sign up to be approved partners in order to receive high resolution versions of our assets and to gain permission to edit our material to meet the needs of their local audience.
We track the pickups and mentions of our stories using a variety of methods. Our story pickup information and estimated audience reach figures were generated by Wisconsin Watch using industry standards pioneered a decade ago by Maplight, a nonpartisan organization researching news organizations’ use of its reports on the influence of money on politics.
Because actual readership numbers for specific stories are not readily available from other news outlets, Wisconsin Watch uses circulation numbers of Wisconsin newspapers from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association to estimate the size of print audiences. To estimate online audience numbers, Wisconsin Watch uses information from Meltwater, a global online clipping service that draws upon data from Similarweb, a web analytics firm.
Audience sizes are estimated through use of formulas that take into account each news organization’s print circulation and typical website traffic counts. On any given story, the actual viewership may vary from the estimate developed by Wisconsin Watch.
Additionally, we distribute our news through a variety of news aggregation sites, such as NewsBreak, Flipboard, Microsoft Start, Apple News and SmartNews.
Here are maps of some of the locations of news organizations that have used or cited our content and examples of places that have been covered in Wisconsin Watch stories.