Raquel Rutledge

Raquel Rutledge is an investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where her investigation into fraud in Wisconsin’s day care subsidy program won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. The series, called “Cashing in on Kids,” also won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and a George Polk Award, among others. In 2011 Rutledge was granted a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where she spent the year examining federal regulation and oversight of the nation’s food supply as it relates to public health. Rutledge was recognized in 2012 with a Gerald Loeb Award and other national accolades for a story investigating a local company responsible for tainted alcohol wipes tied to the death of a 2-year-old boy. Her latest work – an investigation into undercover storefront stings being run by the ATF, exposed how agents used people with intellectual disabilities to promote their fake storefronts, paid them with cigarettes and later arrested them on gun and drug charges. The federal agents also located their operations in safe zones near schools and churches, lured teens with Xbox consoles and beer, and paid sky-high prices for weapons, spurring burglaries and in some cases leading people to buy guns at retail stores and sell them to undercover agents for a quick profit. The series, “Backfire,” won first place in IRE’s 2014 investigative awards for print journalism. Rutledge is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She joined the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel staff in 2004, after working at the Colorado Springs Gazette for nearly seven years covering, City Hall, education and the military.