By Pete Madden & Susanna Granieri

In August 2021, Wausau Pilot & Review, a small newspaper in central Wisconsin, acted on a tip from a reader and reported that a local businessman uttered a homophobic slur during a recent county board meeting. He denied it and demanded a retraction.

When he didn’t get it, he sued the paper for defamation.

The story, it seemed to us, was accurate. According to The New York Times, three independent witnesses who attended the meeting provided sworn statements that they heard the businessman use the term. But by the time a court dismissed the case in April 2023, the paper had reportedly amassed $150,000 in legal bills, bringing the publication to the brink of collapse. And then the businessman appealed. A successful crowdfunding campaign kept the paper afloat until, more than three years later, a judge finally decided the plaintiff had not produced compelling evidence of actual malice.

The newspaper did solid reporting. They successfully defended themselves. And it almost put them out of business. How is that possible?

Our pursuit of an answer to that question led us on a more than two-year journey that culminated this past November with our release of The SLAPP Back Initiative — the first national database of alleged strategic lawsuits against public participation — an ongoing data investigation examining the origins and outcomes of meritless or malicious legal actions targeting the press and other protected speakers.

There have been thousands of such lawsuits filed since the tactic was first identified and examined in 1988, and 39 states plus the District of Columbia and Guam have enacted laws to help people facing them fight back. But those laws vary in quality from state to state, and 11 states — including Wisconsin — have no anti-SLAPP protections. Federal legislation, meanwhile, has remained elusive, hampered by a dearth of reliable data on the scope of the problem, with cases scattered across state and federal dockets. We wanted to change that.

It started with a proposal for a new platform from a pair of media attorneys – Laura Lee Prather chair of the media law practice at Haynes Boone, and Victoria Baranetsky, general counsel at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Prather had studied the strategies to combat SLAPPs deployed in the European Union, while Baranetsky had successfully defended Reveal against a multi-year suit brought by one of the subjects of its investigations. They emerged with the belief that tracking and mapping individual cases — and mining the data to reveal common targets and repeat offenders — could bring transparency and accountability to an otherwise opaque and amorphous problem.

First, we had to fundraise like entrepreneurs. We developed a successful proposal for the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s Venture Capital Fund, which awards seed money to faculty and staff pursuing projects in the public interest. We also raised enough additional funds from a handful of journalism support organizations in order to hire a small team – Sam Rabiyah, a computational journalist; Sarah Almukhtar, a data designer; Derek Abella, an illustrator; and Sonya Carson, a fact-checker. We obtained a subscription to the legal database Westlaw, compiled a list of statute codes for anti-SLAPP laws across the country and scraped case files and metadata to create a first-of-its-kind repository of national scope.

Then, we became product managers. We tested and deployed AI-powered research tools to aid in our case analysis. We filled a whiteboard in our small office with a list of platform features essential for launch. We oversaw a fact-checking process and final website audit for quality control. And we delivered a viable product within a year of the project’s first hire.

Our analysis of more than 500 cases decided in 2024 shows that the media was targeted by dozens of SLAPPs that year. It also confirms, as our founding editor Stephen Solomon said, “what observers had long suspected: the media are a significant target of potentially frivolous or malicious litigation designed to chill speech and stifle scrutiny.”

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, our initial reporting has shown the press and its advocates that “the SLAPP problem is worse than we thought.” But as a team of two journalists working outside of a traditional newsroom, we knew from the beginning that we would need more than a reporter and an editor in order to unlock those insights. That effort not only stretched our skills as journalists but also showed us how powerful multidisciplinary collaborations can be when tackling complex problems.

Now, we can get back to storytelling. We are fielding inquiries from media outlets interested in exploring investigative angles in their coverage areas. A new partnership with First Amendment clinics at universities is helping us expedite case review and make our dataset more robust. And, perhaps most importantly, tips from the public on suspected SLAPPs are rolling in, a sign of both a growing awareness of the problem and a growing interest in solving it.

Anti-SLAPP legislation is under active consideration at both the state and federal levels, so data, particularly data showing the financial impact of SLAPPs on taxpayer-funded court systems, could have an immediate impact. For us, the work has already been rewarding. We see it as journalism for journalism, an investigation with the potential to safeguard newsrooms. Protections could have made a big difference for The Wausau Pilot & Review. They could make a big difference for all of us.