Project — Live
An independent monthly covering county government, the courts, and public records in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin. William Horschak founded it, publishes it, and writes the courts and county-government beat himself.
Why It Exists
Local accountability journalism has thinned out across rural Wisconsin. County boards meet, judges rule, and records get withheld with no reporter in the room.
The Trempealeau Pioneer exists because the meetings still happen whether or not anyone writes them down. County boards set budgets, a circuit court carries one of the heaviest caseloads in the state, and public bodies answer records requests on their own schedule — and in a county without a dedicated accountability reporter, none of it reaches the people it affects.
It is a natural extension of the same open-records work William has done from the requester side. Filing a request establishes what a public body holds; publishing what the record shows is what makes the disclosure matter to anyone beyond the requester. The Pioneer is where that second half happens.
The Beat
Three subjects that decide a great deal locally and get reported on very little. Every story starts from the underlying document.
Courts
Sentencings, caseloads, and the mechanics that decide outcomes — including how a single county court carries one of the heaviest filing loads in Wisconsin, and what happens between a judge's ruling and the clerk who makes it real.
County government
County politics reported from the record: what state law requires, what county code says, and what happens when the two disagree — the kind of conflict that decides who holds an office and never makes the regional news.
Public records
Stories grounded in the primary record rather than another outlet's summary: requests filed, productions read closely, and the gaps between what was asked for and what was released treated as part of the story.
How It Operates
The Pioneer publishes its editorial standards, its corrections policy, and its ownership and funding — the same transparency it asks of the public bodies it covers.
01
No chain ownership, no syndicated filler. An independent monthly accountable to the county it covers, with its ownership and funding stated openly rather than buried.
02
Filings, ordinances, and produced records are the source. Where a figure appears in a story, it traces to the document it came from — not to another outlet's characterization of it.
03
The Pioneer publishes its editorial standards and a corrections policy, and holds itself to both. Getting it wrong in public means saying so in public.
04
One edition a month by email. No lists sold, no reader data brokered — the same standard applied to readers that the reporting demands of public bodies.
William Horschak’s stories at the Trempealeau Pioneer (opens in a new tab)
The Through-Line
The Pioneer is the same discipline that runs through the rest of this work, pointed at a county.
Hospitality taught William to document, track, and decide on evidence rather than instinct. Open-records practice taught him how public information is actually created, withheld, and released. Publishing a newspaper is where those meet: identify the custodian, file the request, read the production closely, and put the result in front of the people whose county it is. Nothing here is legal advice, and the reporting is journalism rather than advocacy — but the habit underneath is identical.
William is available for professional inquiries related to hospitality revenue strategy, open-records research, civic-transparency tools, web ventures, and business-development concepts.