Jessica McBride | Milwaukee Award Winning Journalist

Jessica McBride, Milwaukee Journalist

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicamcbride1
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessica.mcbride100

Jessica’s opinions on this website and all WRN and personal social media pages, including Facebook and X, represent her own opinions and not those of the institution where she works. 

Jessica McBride, Milwaukee journalist and Wisconsin Right Now owner and editor-in-chief, is a national award-winning journalist and journalism educator with more than 25 years in journalism. She has editorial control of Wisconsin Right Now.

She is the recipient of the UW-Milwaukee Alumni Foundation’s Teaching Excellence Award for her innovations in teaching and her founding of the Minority Media Association, which champions media diversity. She was the co-founder of the U-View campus television program focusing on bringing diverse voices to campus and improving media diversity.

U View example.

Jessica McBride’s journalism career started at the Waukesha Freeman newspaper in 1993, covering City Hall. She was an investigative, crime, and general assignment reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for a decade. Since 2004, she has taught journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has appeared in many news outlets, including Patch.com, WTMJ, WISN, WUWM, Wispolitics.com, OnMilwaukee.com, Milwaukee Magazine, Nightline, El Conquistador Latino Newspaper, Japanese and German television, Channel 58, Reader’s Digest, Twist (magazine), Wisconsin Public Radio, Heavy.com, BBC, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, and others. 

Jessica McBride, Milwaukee, Wisconsin area resident, has appeared on true-crime programs for Investigation Discovery, Oxygen Channel, and History Channel. She has a Master’s Degree in Mass Communication from UWM and judges statewide journalism competitions nationwide for press clubs in states ranging from Idaho to Louisiana. Her work is her own and does not represent the institutions where she works, including UWM.

• Jessica McBride is a winner of prestigious state journalism awards for categories including investigative reporting, column writing, blogging, feature story that first appeared on the Web, story that contributed to the community welfare, short feature writing, magazine feature writing, spot-news reporting, explanatory/interpretive reporting, and best continuous reporting. She is the winner of the national Clark Mollenhoff Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting. She won regional awards in investigative reporting and personality profile.
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (winner of newspaper staff award).
• Some highlights:
  • UW-Milwaukee Alumni Association Teaching Excellence Award for academic staff recipient, 2008.
  • Co-editor of Media Milwaukee, the department’s national, regional, and state award-winning online news site.
  • Founder and faculty advisor for the Minority Media Association of UWM. This is a student media club that champions diversity in the media. Among other activities, the club brings diverse speakers to campus and obtains grants to send diverse students to career fairs sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists and others.
  • Has chaired the Curriculum and Internship and Scholarships Committees. Member of the JAMS transition committee. Has served on many departmental committees.
  • Helped create and produce content for the U View campus television show on media diversity.
  • Created the department’s first Living Learning Community.
  • Received student success certificate.
  • Conducted scholarly research into the media that was presented internationally in South Africa, Australia, and Belgium. Scholarly work published in prestigious Australian journal.
  • Helped develop guidelines on social media for international journalism educators at the World Journalism Education Congress, 2010, 2013.
  • Frequent judge of state press association contests (Idaho, Syracuse, New Orleans, etc.).
  • Former Advisory Board member of the WISN Political Commitment project.
  • Supervised student advertising assignment that was turned into a Super Bowl ad by Chevrolet.
  • Convergence and Society: The Participatory Web, University of South Carolina, presenter, “Using Blog Talk Radio in the Classroom.” Fall 2008.
  • Student work in classes has won numerous state and regional reporting and writing awards and first-place national Society of Professional Journalists’ awards for online in-depth reporting and for online feature reporting.
  • Previous class partnerships with Student Press Law Center of Virginia, Journal Communications NOW, Patch.com, Urban Milwaukee.com, Wisconsin Innocence Project.
  • Obtained immersion project grant.
  • Jessica McBride teaching evaluations at UWM scored an average of 4.4 on a 0 to 5 scale for all classes from hire to indefinite status.
  • Created and runs a professional social media course that supervises the department’s social media pages

Learn more about Jessica here.

Jessica McBride: Education & Career Accomplishments

Jessica McBride was the class Salutatorian for Flambeau High School in Tony, Wisconsin. She also won a US Army National Award and participated in all-conference volleyball. She went to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Print and Broadcast Journalism in 1992. She completed post-graduation with Master’s degree in Mass Communication in 1993. Jessica McBride is part of a Milwaukee journalism family as newspapers were a family affair; her grandparents were reporters for the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel and her father was a film critic for Daily Variety and works as a professor of cinema.