The Recombobulation Area wins Gold at Milwaukee Press Club awards for fifth consecutive year
Contributor Emily Mills won Gold for "Best Single Editorial" and Dan Shafer was also honored for "Best Columnist."
The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time 21-TIME! Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
The Recombobulation Area and Civic Media have won two awards at the Milwaukee Press Club’s 2025 Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism Awards.
Contributor Emily Mills won Gold for “Best Single Editorial, Statement of Editorial Position or Opinion” for the column, “How AI is harming Wisconsin’s path to renewable energy.”
Founding Editor Dan Shafer won Bronze for “Best Columnist.” Each of these awards came in the “Online” section. This is the sixth consecutive year in which The Recombobulation Area has won a Milwaukee Press Club award, and the fifth consecutive year to win Gold. Previous Gold honorees include Shafer, and contributors Angela Lang and Philip Rocco.
This year’s awards dinner featured Sacred Cat Award Honoree Astead Herndon, a host and editorial director at Vox, and 2026 Headliners community service awardees Ken-David Masur, music director and conductor with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra; and Mary McCormick, executive director at Rotary Club of Milwaukee.
A full list of winners is available here.
The Recombobulation Area has now earned 21 honors from the Milwaukee Press Club in six years. Dan Shafer has now won 17 awards as part of The Recombobulation Area, which launched in 2019, and 24 awards overall, including for work at the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and ThirdCoast Digest, between 2011 and 2017.
These honors would not be possible without the incredible support of our readers, followers and subscribers. Being a reader-funded publication, it’s been those subscribers — it’s been you — who have powered these achievements.
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We are endlessly grateful for your support of The Recombobulation Area, and we’re looking forward to producing more award-winning work in 2026.
Take a look back at previous winners here:
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he and the publication joined Civic Media, where he is currently a Contributing Editor. He’s 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 24 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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Follow Dan Shafer on Twitter at @DanRShafer, at BlueSky at @danshafer.bsky.social, and on Threads at @danshafer.
Guys, there seems to be like a total of five organizations that share all these awards among each other—but hey, we bet the Caesar salad was pretty good
Congrats! It's nice to see you all and Joshua/Alex from Scummy Water Tower among the winners.