Matt Achenbach, 36, stands with his cows just outside Eastman. He’s concerned about the dwindling number of family-operated farms in the area. “It costs too much money to go out and buy an operation,” Achenbach said. “Your debt load is going to be so big it’s ridiculous. You almost have to inherit it. And that’s where family farms are becoming extinct, becoming corporations, everything’s just getting bigger. I’d like to see a small farm, one family operation not have to hire anyone, be able to work by itself.” Achenbach said he’ll be voting for Trump. Photo by Caroline Kubzansky.

Maroon editor immerses herself where national media touches down for a day

By CHRISTOPHER HEIMERMAN
For Illinois Press Association

It was a rich sample of blue-collar Wisconsin: farmers markets and the farms stocking them, parks, ice cream shops, gas stations, and, when COVID-19 protocols were followed, local party offices.

From Aug. 13 to 29, Caroline Kubzansky (left) left no hay bale unturned as she navigated the virus and country roads to gauge and report the political temperature in the far reaches of the swing Badger State that flipped blue in the 2020 presidential election.

The 21-year-old University of Chicago fourth-year student and managing editor of the school’s newspaper, The Maroon, insisted one thing go on the record after she recounted the surreal experience during a phone interview Dec. 15.

“I want to underline three times that I would not have done it if I didn’t think I could keep 6 feet away, outside, and do it safely,” she said.

As part of her internship with WisPolitics, she scoured Kenosha County before driving to Winnebago County (now a Covid-19 hotbed southwest of Green Bay), where she covered a Trump rally in an airport hangar. Next she covered ultra-rural white Crawford and Adams counties near Madison, before making the 7-hour journey through mostly deep-red country to Sawyer County, a traditional bellwether in the Northwoods.

“It was very lonely,” Kubzansky said. “It wasn’t, ‘Reporter settles in with the community.’ It was ‘Reporter draws a 6-foot bubble.’ I got groceries once.”

She did some door-to-door canvassing, “attempted” meeting sources at local bars, “although that’s sort of cliched,” she said, and felt her skin crawl at some places where COVID-19 protocols were not being followed.

Kubzansky was grateful to the university’s Institute of Politics for footing the AirBNB bills so she could feel safe in single-person lodging.

But she still thought critically about the trip before hitting the road.

“I seriously considered the implications and the example it set for me to be traveling under these circumstances,” she said. “I’m someone who very strongly subscribes to social distancing. So I took a gallon of hand sanitizer and stood on a lot of sidewalks 6 feet away from people.”

A mannequin models a mask at the Adams Flea Market. Photo by Caroline Kubzansky.

Not a ‘political football’ fan

Kubzansky spent 3 days in Kenosha County canvassing sidewalks and searching country homes and farms for locals she could talk to safely.

“Fortunately it was summer, so a lot of people were outside in their yards,” she said. “I’d just approach them and ask if they’d be willing to talk to me about politics and bills that affect them.”

Two days after she left the county, a police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back, and the national media swarmed the City of Kenosha.

“People were really eager to turn it into a political football,” Kubzansky said, with an edge in her voice. “It made me sad that so much of it was about how Kenosha would vote. I met a lot of people in the couple of days leading up to that, and I could guess how they were responding to the unrest there. Having gotten to know a lot of people pretty closely, I was really sad to see this happening, knowing they were really freaked out.”

Her report on the state of the county includes a half-dozen sources from various walks of life and political leanings, from the chairs of the county’s parties to a former columnist, a former Democratic

Senate candidate, and a writer and customer language analyst up in arms over “the left … condoning violence as an expression of emotion.”

“She knows the difference between parachuting in for a story, and having spent a little bit more time there,” said Melissa Navas (left), the IOP’s career development director and a mentor to Kubzansky. “In political journalism, you’ll have people fly in and go to a local diner. At her heart, she cares about communities. She knows she needs to immerse herself in a place and not make assertions.”

That’s the job, Kubzansky said. She said she read some national pubs “just as sanity checks,” but mostly stuck to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and, of course, WisPolitics.

“This is what the local media exists to do,” she said.

Leaning on mentors

As polling in Kenosha County began to tilt toward Donald Trump, Kubzansky reached out to another mentor to further assuage her anxiety.

The previous summer, she’d interned for The Iowa Project, where she met David Yepsen, a veteran political reporter and a fixture in Iowa public TV.

“He provided a long-lens view on the whole thing. He’s known the Iowa political scene since 1976,” Kubzanky said. “He’s a lovely dude who’s invested in seeing younger folks come up in journalism.”

It’s immediately evident in a conversation with Kubzansky that she’s hard-wired for journalism. Over the past 2 years, she’s regularly surprised Navas in her first-floor office on campus.

“She’ll just pop into my office with this intensity,” Navas said. “I can tell in her eyes that she wants to talk about a story, or journalism ethics, or anything that isn’t sitting right with her.”

Kubzansky has been involved with The Maroon “since [she] stepped foot on campus as a freshman,” and since being voted in as managing editor days before the pandemic hit, has stepped up and become a mentor herself.

“She’s got this incredible mind for structure and organization, but also for encouragement,” Navas said.

Navas swelled with pride when The Maroon published a story on the campus shutting down the day before the announcement was made. The coverage during the pandemic in general was top-shelf.

But the relentless coverage also exposed the ironic weakness Kubzansky shares with most dogged journalists.

“Sometimes, I have to remind her to just take a deep breath,” Navas said. “I don’t want her to burn out on it early. She is hard-wired to be a journalist. She has this curiosity that will serve her well, and has served her well so far.”

Ready to report where needed

Kubzansky did the interviews for this piece from her parents’ house in Washington, D.C. She said she chose to attend the University of Chicago, “because I’m a big nerd.”

“I got to Chicago and took one look at what I saw,” she said. “I saw a lot of other people who put a lot of stock into books.”

Because the university doesn’t have a J-school, she’s majoring in English and philosophy.

The novels she’s read over the years lend to morals and “say something about the best way to live,” she
said. Before arriving in Chicago, she mostly read long-form journalism in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and
the like.

Being assigned to the development beat - “which I kidded and called the gentrification beat,” she said - and covering emotionally charged topics like the proposed extension of the Green Line on Chicago’s South Side, her focus has become hyper-local.

Kubzansky is enamored with the public square-focused City Bureau, and she calls working for Block Club, which covers all aspects of the city’s underserved neighborhoods, “a dream of mine.” 

She’s also moved by news that hits hardest in the rural Midwest: from the dairy crisis and the defund-the-police coming home to roost, to brain drain and indiginous people’s role in local civic machines.

So living and working in, say, St. Croix County along the Wisconsin-Minnesota border would work as well as staying in the city that’s captured her heart.

“It would be tough from a personal perspective, but I need work,” she said. “And I’d definitely go work in St. Croix County over CNN in a heartbeat.”

LEFT: Virgil Miller, models the masks he purchased on Main Street. He takes a dim view of President Trump.  “[Trump] has no respect for people, no respect for women, no respect for anyone but himself,” Miller said. Photo by Caroline Kubzansky.