What this paper is
The Trempealeau Pioneer is an independent monthly with a narrow charter: county government, village and town government, public records and public money. Every board meeting read. Every records request logged. Opinion clearly labeled, never disguised as news.
The Pioneer is made up of several citizen journalists — people who live here, work here and sit through the meetings — committed to one thing: making sure the people of this county hear what their elected leaders are doing. Nobody at this paper went to journalism school. Everybody at this paper reads the minutes.
The paper is independently owned. It belongs to no chain, no fund and no party. It is free to read, supported by subscriptions to the print edition, local advertising and readers who think a county is better off watched.
The Pioneer Dispatch
Every records-driven investigation from the courthouse, the morning it publishes. Free. No lists sold.
We use your address to send you the edition and for nothing else. No lists are sold or shared — read the privacy promise.
How we work
News stories say how we know what we report. When a fact comes from a document, we say which one; when it comes from a person, we name them unless there is a serious reason not to, and we say what that reason is. Paid content, if we ever carry any, will be labeled in plain words.
Where a story rests on records, we publish the records. Most articles carry a “Verify it yourself” box with the original documents — campaign finance filings, state studies, records returns — so readers can check our work without taking our word for it. The full archive of county records behind our reporting lives at CivicIntel, the Pioneer’s records-research arm.
The Watchdog desk files requests under Wisconsin’s public records law and publishes a running scoreboard of what we asked for, who answered and what came back — including the denials.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we say so in print and online, plainly and in the same place the error appeared. Spot one? Write to publisher@trempealeaupioneer.com with “Correction” in the subject line. We do not quietly rewrite stories.
Letters to the editor
The Pioneer publishes letters of up to 250 words on matters of local public concern. Include your name, your town and a way to reach you; we verify every letter before it runs and publish name and town only. We edit for length and clarity, not for opinion. One letter per writer per edition. Send letters to publisher@trempealeaupioneer.com with “Letter” in the subject line.
Your information
If you sign up for the monthly dispatch, we use your address to send you the edition and for nothing else. No lists are sold or shared. The site sets no advertising trackers and no cookies. What it does count is which pages get read and — where a business has bought space — how many times that notice was actually on screen and how many times somebody clicked it. None of those counts is tied to who you are: there is no cookie, no device fingerprint and no profile behind them, which is also the reason we cannot tell an advertiser how many people saw anything, only how many times a page was read. The whole counting method is written out, including what it cannot do. Those counts are kept for 400 days and then deleted — long enough to compare a month against the same month a year earlier, which is the only comparison a monthly paper really makes, and short enough that “forever” is not the answer by default. A paper that asks the county how long it holds its number-plate scans should be able to say how long it holds its own records without going to look.
The reader panel is the one place we ask for more. Verifying that a panel member lives in the county means mailing a postcard, so we take a name and a street address, stored separately from everything else. When the code is used we delete them, unless the member has asked us to keep the address so we can mail the print edition and paper surveys. Unverified applications are deleted within 90 days. What we keep in every case is an email address, a town, and the age, education and sex ranges a member chooses to give — the fields that let us weight results against census figures. Survey answers are stored against a panel number, never against a name.
Reach us
News tips, advertising, letters and print subscriptions all reach the publisher’s desk at publisher@trempealeaupioneer.com — put what it’s about in the subject line. The Pioneer is also on Facebook and YouTube, where we publish meeting footage in full.
Colophon
Headlines are set in Playfair Display, article text in Source Serif, and labels in Libre Franklin. The site is hand-built, self-hosted and free of trackers.