The Recombobulation Area wins one gold, two silver at Milwaukee Press Club awards
As a publication, The Recombobulation Area has won 13 awards from the Milwaukee Press Club in four years, including three gold and five silver honors.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication written, edited and published by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. Learn more about it here.
For the fourth consecutive year, The Recombobulation Area is a winner at the Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism competition.
The award finalists for the 94th annual awards were announced in March, and on Friday night at the Pfister Hotel for the Gridiron Awards Dinner, honorees were given gold, silver or bronze awards. The Milwaukee Press Club also honored LeRoy Butler, Green Bay Packers legend and NFL Hall of Fame honoree; and Tim Sheehy, retired president of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce (MMAC), with Headliner Awards. This year’s Sacred Cat Award honoree is James Bennet, senior editor and weekly Lexington columnist for The Economist, and former editorial page editor at The New York Times. You can see the full list of 2023 Excellence in Journalism awardees here.
The Recombobulation Area was a finalist in three categories and brought home one gold and two silver awards. This is the third year in a row where The Recombobulation Area has won a gold award.
This year’s gold award winner is Philip Rocco for “Best Explanatory Story or Series” for “The legislative battle over Act 12.” This phenomenal series broke down complicated policy proposals with in-depth analysis, done in real time. You can read the full series collected on one page here. Rocco, a political science professor at Marquette University, is a regular contributor to The Recombobulation Area.
Another contributor honored this year was Angela Lang. Lang is the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC). A column she wrote won silver for “Best Single Editorial, Statement of Editorial Position or Opinion” for a column titled, “Black voters in Milwaukee might not be as big on Biden right now. But we need to reframe our thinking of electoral politics in 2024.” You can read it here.
The silver award winner for “Best Column” this year is Dan Shafer, the founder of The Recombobulation Area. This is the fourth time Shafer has been honored with a “Best Column” award.
In a more than a decade in journalism in Milwaukee, Dan Shafer, founder of The Recombobulation Area, has won 18 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards, including five gold awards. Along with the eleven for The Recombobulation Area, awards were won while on staff at the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine and ThirdCoast Digest.
As a publication, The Recombobulation Area has won 13 awards from the Milwaukee Press Club in four years, including three gold and five silver honors.
The Milwaukee Press Club is the oldest continuously operating press club in North America, formally established in 1885.
The Recombobulation Area is a weekly opinion column and online publication covering news and politics in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. The publication features in-depth analysis, incisive commentary, original reporting, and more. It is an influential voice that is upending political media in the nation’s most closely contested swing state.
Launched in 2019 as a part-time project by veteran Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer, who was a stay-at-home parent at the time, The Recombobulation Area has grown considerably over the last few years, now reaching thousands of subscribers and to date, more than 1.3 million readers.
Learn more about what’s been happening with this publication here.
As a reader-funded, independent publication, we are endlessly grateful for your support. Without it, none of this would be possible.
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He’s also written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 18 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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Follow Dan Shafer on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
Well done, Dan.
Congratulations!