Joe Ahlers: A Man on the Move

Four framed photographs are carefully arranged on the top shelf of Joe Ahlers' desk, but the first thing you notice when you walk in are the half-empty boxes randomly scattered around the room. Joe Ahlers is a man on the move.

Three of the photographs show Ahlers with politicians Russ Feingold, Herb Kohl, and Gwen Moore. The fourth is a photograph of the first-generation college graduate with a huge grin in his cap and gown.

For two years in college, Ahlers served as editor-in-chief for a UW-Milwaukee student newspaper, The Leader, and "single-handedly saved the paper" in his own words. As a student journalist, he gained a number of contacts that have helped him become a freelance writer after graduation. Besides that remark, he is surprisingly humble for a man with so much success in his field.

"I got really lucky," Ahlers says. He remarks that he knows of only four journalism majors from his graduating class who have actually found jobs. But it's not all luck. When I mentioned his name to Jessica McBride, his JMC 201 teacher and mentor, a big smile came to her face.

"I noticed him right away," she says. "He was a natural writer. It's unusual for a student to stick out in a class that size, but he's one of the top five students I've ever taught." Again, Ahlers is considerably more humble. "I didn't think my writing was any good."

As a freelance journalist, Ahlers spends fifty to sixty hours a week on various projects in the Milwaukee area. He estimates about forty hours a week are spent working for MKE Magazine working on lifestyle pieces, which he explains are a major attraction for him. "You get to meet so many interesting people, and you start to think you can have a lot of hobbies and have a lot more time than you actually do," he says.

The remaining working hours of the week Ahlers writes for the prominent Wisconsin political website wispolitics.com, where he served as an intern in the spring of 2005. McBride, who also works for the site, recalls that the organization was so impressed with his work during the internship that they offered him a reoccurring column. "The thing with Joe is he was actually interested in politics, which is something you can't just learn.

The perceived fame of a journalist's life is also appealing to Ahlers. "Though you may not be getting paid the most money, you're a celebrity," he says. "I've even had people tell me that women think journalists are sexy because their job is so interesting."

But Ahlers wasn't always an aspiring journalist. When he came to UW-Milwaukee in the fall of 2002, he was originally a theater major who had been acting onstage since he was seven. He recalls the closing of the Professional Theater Program at UWM the year before he came to the university and how it convinced him to switch majors.

After taking a semester of general courses, Ahlers took his first journalism class in the spring of 2003 and quickly recognized he had found his niche. Though he was originally interested in broadcast news, he tells me he realized that it was a crowded field with many qualified newscasters.

After what he describes as "a very bad experience" with the UWM broadcast club, Ahlers joined The Leader as a film writer in April 2003 and rapidly ascended to the editor in chief of the paper the following year.

During his tenure at the paper, Ahlers used his on-campus connections to break a number of important campus-specific stories ranging from unreported student organization debt to student government scandals. "He had the willpower to do it," McBride says. "I've seen a lot of natural writers fail because they were lazy, but Joe had that X-factor."

By his graduation in May of 2006, only seven years after the paper's creation, The Leader had gone from a shoddy, debt-riddled biweekly student newspaper to a professional 6,000-issue circulated publication. In the words of fellow Leader editor Brian Jacobson, "Anything that anybody would fall behind on, or fall away on, Joe would pick it up to try to keep it going," he said. "He had a sense of responsibility to a product with his voice, his stamp....it's a matter of pride."

According to Ahlers, the experience and knowledge he gained as a journalism student have been invaluable. "This will always be the biggest growth period in my life and it really helped define who I was...the turning point where I really started to figure out who I was and what kind of journalist I was going to be," he says.

Ahlers isn't content to remain a journalist, however. "I want to go to law school, I think it's important" he says with a smile. "I think it'd be fun to run for political office." Whatever the future holds for Ahlers, it's bright. "If you look towards the future, you can really see him in that," Jacobson says. "A Perry White at the Daily Planet kind of thing, he's just built for it." McBride agrees. "Joe has all the skills a good reporter needs to succeed, along with the motivation to make it happen."

Someday Ahlers may add a fifth photograph to his desk of himself in an expensive suit beaming at the camera from behind his desk in Washington D.C., but for now he is simply content to be a man on the move.