Wisconsin Watch has a nationally acclaimed board of directors, including experts in investigative journalism, nonprofit journalism and nonprofit financial management that determines policies, while day-to-day operations are handled by the staff. Individuals’ affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.
Board officers
Kathy Bissen
Board chair
Kathy Bissen is the Associate Director and Chief Operating Officer at PBS Wisconsin and is responsible for a wide range of services at the statewide public media network including Operations, Engineering and Finance as well as being part of the Wisconsin Public Media Leadership Team.
Previously Bissen has been PBS Wisconsin’s Director of Production responsible for overseeing the creation and dissemination of hundreds of hours of original broadcast and digital content every year; and Executive Producer of News and Public Affairs. She has also been the Producer of multiple national PBS documentaries; Co-Creator and Producer of GET REAL!, a children’s television series that aired on commercial and public broadcasting; co-founder of WisContext, a digital news and information service; and was co-director of LZ Lambeau, the largest community engagement event in PBS history. Her work is widely recognized having earned a National Emmy for a documentary on political advertising, multiple USC Annenberg Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Political Journalism, Parents’ Choice Awards, regional Emmys and Edward R. Murrow Awards. During her career, which started in commercial television, she has reported extensively on science, health, legal, educational and environmental issues.
She is a former member of the Advisory Board for the Center for Journalism Ethics; is on the President’s International Advisory Board for St. Cloud State University, and works with a number of charitable foundations. More by Kathy Bissen
Barbara Johnson
Vice chairman
Barbara Johnson joined Wisconsin Watch in 2016 as a volunteer senior strategic adviser. As interim executive director, she helped strengthen operations, with a special focus on the development of Wisconsin Watch’s business model. Johnson was CEO and COO of four media companies in New York and Madison before her retirement in 2015. She was also a reporter and editor for 15 years before moving into business roles, winning national and state awards for her investigative stories. She has served on the boards of public and private companies and as an operating partner of a private equity firm. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan. More by Barbara Johnson
Herman Baumann
Board secretary
Herman Baumann is active in the journalism community. A resident of Madison, he is board chair for the Daily Cardinal Media Corporation, the nonprofit organization that owns The Daily Cardinal, a UW-Madison student news organization. He also serves on the Wisconsin Newspaper Association Foundation Board, and is a founding board member of the Wisconsin Collegiate Media Association. Baumann is the former editor and managing editor of the now-defunct Chicago Suburban Times Newspapers chain, and was assistant editor of the Vilas County News-Review in Eagle River, Wis. As a health care marketer and new product developer, he has several “firsts” to his credit. At Children’s Memorial Hospital (now Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago), the pediatric teaching hospital of Northwestern University Medical School, he created that organization’s first marketing department, and led development of its first logo, advertising campaigns, and sponsorship program. While at Voluntary Hospitals of America (now Vizient Inc.), Baumann led development of health promotion and disease prevention programs that reached millions of people. At the American Hospital Association, Baumann developed that organization’s first sponsorship program. In 2007 Baumann founded Green Line Strategies LLC, from which he retired in 2016. The firm provided sponsorship, marketing and strategic planning services to trade associations and other not-for-profit organizations. Baumann received a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1975 from the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which presented him with a Distinguished Service Award in 2007. He now serves on the UW-Madison College of Letters and Science Board of Visitors. More by Herman Baumann
Michael Louis Vinson
Board treasurer
Michael Louis Vinson is an LGBTQ, media and arts leader who lives in Green Bay. He is employed as Sales Director at Schreiber Foods and recently served as Chairman Emeritus of Fair Wisconsin, Inc., the state’s leading advocacy organization for the LGBTQ community, where he was on the board for six years and served in multiple leadership capacities. He also serves on the LGBT Caucus Advisory Board for the Democratic National Committee. Vinson sits on the board of Arts Midwest, which serves a nine-state region in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. Previously, he held an arts leadership fellowship at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Ill. A former journalist, Vinson holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, where he was a McCormick Scholar, and earned his bachelor’s degree in Government at Harvard University, where he was a Jackie Robinson Foundation Scholar. More by Michael Louis Vinson
Board members
Ellen M. Gilligan
Board member
Ellen Gilligan amplified the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s role as community leader, convener and catalyst as its president and CEO from 2010 until her retirement in 2024, bringing people together around a shared vision for a vibrant region. Her tenure was marked by growth, collaboration and a deep commitment to strategies that foster access to opportunity, strengthen the community and improve lives. She led the foundation to undertake a historic Greater Together campaign, which raised $726.8 million from more than 4,800 donors, exceeding its goal of $700 million. The comprehensive campaign was broadly inclusive of all donors’ philanthropic goals and strategically focused on key issues, including early care and education, health equity, economic inclusion and housing.
Serving Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties, the foundation is Wisconsin’s largest community foundation – managing more than $1 billion in assets. Since being established in 1915, the foundation has awarded over $1 billion in grants supporting a wide variety of nonprofits and initiatives that enhance the quality of life in greater Milwaukee and beyond. Those included support for Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and for in-depth public service journalism projects that shed light on how Milwaukee went from ranking statistically as one of the best places in the nation for African American families in the early 1970s to one of the worst places after a massive loss in manufacturing jobs.
In 2020, Gillligan led the launch of the foundation’s new strategic vision of “A Milwaukee for All” to focus philanthropy on mending the fault line of systemic racism that prevents individuals, families and the region from reaching their full potential. She guided the foundation through the organization and launch of Milwaukee Succeeds, a communitywide educational partnership focused on success for every child in every school, cradle to career. She encouraged the development of the foundation’s impact investing program, which committed to investing $30 million over five years to support small businesses, job creation and economic opportunity in communities where investment has been scarce. And she guided the foundation’s lead role in the community-centered ThriveOn Collaboration and its place-based strategies for advancing racial and health equity.
Much of Gilligan’s career has been dedicated to the community foundation field. Before coming to Milwaukee, she spent 12 years at the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. She serves on the national boards of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and CFLeads, a national network of community foundations leading change (past board chair).
She serves on the board of the Greater Milwaukee Committee and co-chairs MKE United.
Gilligan was a member of the Milwaukee Succeeds Leadership Table, co-chair of the MKE United Downtown Action Agenda, and a mayoral appointment to the city of Milwaukee’s Black Male Achievement Advisory Council. She is a past board member of the United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Waukesha County.
Gilligan is a graduate of the University of Colorado. She and her husband,
Charlie DeSando, have two adult sons. More by Ellen M. Gilligan
Mukhtar Ibrahim
Board member
Mukhtar Ibrahim is the founding publisher and CEO of Sahan Journal, a nonprofit online news organization dedicated to covering Minnesota immigrants and communities of color.
He previously worked as a staff writer for the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio News. He has also written for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Al Jazeera English, BuzzFeed News and Wisconsin Watch, where he was an investigative reporting fellow in 2017
Ibrahim is among the first trained journalists of Somali background in Minnesota and in the country. He earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota and a graduate degree in investigative and data journalism from Columbia University.
He is the recipient of the prestigious leadership fellowship from the St. Paul-based Bush Foundation (2016), a “Great Immigrant” award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (2019), Islamic Resource Group’s “Building Bridges Award in Media” (2019), Twin Cities Business Magazine’s 100 People to Know (2020), recognized as the Institute for Nonprofit News ‘Emerging Leader’ (2021). He is also the recipient of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s First Decade Award, given to an alum in recognition of contributions to the journalism profession during the first 10 years after graduation from the school.
Born in Somalia, Ibrahim spent his childhood in Ethiopia and Kenya and has lived his adult life in Minnesota. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and three daughters. More by Mukhtar Ibrahim
Kathleen Kingsbury
Board member
Kathleen Kingsbury leads the Opinion report for the New York Times. She first joined The Times in 2017 as deputy editorial page editor.
As head of Opinion, she oversees the editorial board, guest essays, opinion columnists, letters to the editor, as well as Opinion’s newsletters, audio, video, graphics, design and digital distribution teams. For The Times, Kingsbury was a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series on guns and domestic violence, and she oversaw the paper’s Pulitzer-winning editorials on race and culture in 2019.
Before joining The Times, Kingsbury worked for the Boston Globe where she last served as managing editor, with a focus on the digital report, in its newsroom.
While at The Globe, Kingsbury was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing for a series on low wages and the mistreatment of workers in the restaurant industries. The same 8-part series, called “Service Not Included,” received the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s 2014 Walker Stone Award for Editorial Writing and the Burl Osborne Award for Editorial Leadership from the American Society of News Editors. She also edited the Globe’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary on race and education.
Kingsbury joined the Globe’s editorial board in 2013 and later edited the Sunday Ideas section. In this role, she was a deputy managing editor for the Globe and the deputy editorial page editor.
Kingsbury has also worked as a New York-based staff writer and Hong Kong-based foreign correspondent for Time Magazine.
After growing up in Portland, Oregon, Kingsbury studied as an undergraduate at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. She has a graduate degree from the Columbia Journalism School, where she was awarded the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. More by Kathleen Kingsbury
Louisa Lincoln
Board member
Originally from Minneapolis, Minn., Louisa Lincoln is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines sustainable funding models for journalism, with a focus on nonprofit news and public media organizations in the United States. Lincoln got involved in the nonprofit news industry as a public engagement and marketing intern at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism in 2016. She went on to work in the sponsorship department at NPR in Washington, D.C., and in the development department at PRX (formerly Public Radio International) before starting her doctoral studies. More recently, Lincoln was a 2022 COMPASS Fellow at the American Journalism Project and was a 2021-2022 Lipman Family Prize Fellow. She is affiliated with the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center and serves on the Steering Committee for the Center for Media at Risk. Lincoln graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in Journalism and Political Science, and a certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies. In 2017, she was awarded the James L. Baughman Senior Achievement Award from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Lincoln also holds a Master of Arts in communication from the University of Pennsylvania. More by Louisa Lincoln
Regina Millner
Board member
Regina Millner was raised in a military family and experienced nine relocations in her childhood. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Nebraska and worked on a masters degree in Outdoor Education at Creighton University. In 1976, Millner moved with her husband and three sons to Madison, Wisconsin.
Over the past 46 years, her life and working experiences have gone through three distinct phases.
The first was as a stay-at-home wife and mother with a significant number of community volunteer activities. The second was as a non-traditional student at UW-Madison earning a JD degree from the Law School and a Master’s degree in Real Estate Finance and Land Planning from the UW-Madison School of Business. The third phase was in business: First as an associate for five years at Michael Best and Friedrich law firm; then as the founding partner in a commercial appraisal company; and finally as the principal in a boutique consulting firm working on real estate projects for government and private entities. She also was an expert witness for litigation real estate cases.
Since her retirement, Millner has served on the boards of a variety of private business, university, government, and nonprofit entities. A sampling includes: Madison Gas & Electric Company; Downtown Madison Inc; Meriter Hospital and Meriter Health Services; Rotary Club of Madison; Wisconsin Alumni Association; Wisconsin Children’s Museum; Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra; and UW System Board of Regents.
Currently Millner serves on the CG Schmidt Construction Company Madison Advisory Board; UW Madison Chazen Council; Friends of PBS Wisconsin Board; WCIJ Board; and WCO Advisory board. In her retirement she also enjoys travel, politics, walking, and entertaining family and friends. More by Regina Millner
H. Carl Mueller
Board member
H. Carl Mueller is the founder and chairman of Mueller Communications, Inc., which serves clients with marketing, public relations and governmental affairs. He has served as a manager and adviser to a Wisconsin governor, several university presidents and a Wisconsin congressman and is a former chief of staff to the mayor of Milwaukee.
Mueller worked closely with Bud Selig, his Milwaukee Brewers club and city and state business, civic and labor leaders to win legislative approval of public financing for a new Brewers ballpark. When Selig moved on to lead Major League Baseball, he maintained a headquarters in Milwaukee and retained Mueller and his firm to work for him as commissioner of baseball.
Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mueller was appointed assistant chancellor for university relations at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1979 and oversaw the development office, the UWM Foundation, and the departments of alumni relations, news services, publications and community relations.
He worked for 10 years as a newspaper reporter and editor for the Milwaukee Sentinel and The Paper for Central Wisconsin. As a newsman, he won national recognition for his work and served as a board member and president of the Society for Professional Journalists. He currently serves as treasurer of the Milwaukee Press Club.
Mueller is a member of the Greater Milwaukee Committee and has served as a board member and president of A Wisconsin African Relief Effort (Project Aware). He also is a member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Counselor’s Academy.
He has served on the Board of Directors of the Milwaukee Urban League, Children’s Outing Association (COA), the UW-Milwaukee Foundation and Alumni Association, Easter Seals, Jewish Family Services, Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Southeast, Jewish Museum Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Public Schools Foundation, Save the Soldiers Home fundraising committee and more.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Mueller has done graduate work at both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He also received professional training at the American Press Institute at Columbia University and at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. More by H. Carl Mueller