In a staffing reorganization that aims to put more reporters in the community to cover issues of local importance, APG publications across southern Wisconsin are moving veteran staff members who had been in managerial roles into senior reporting roles, the company has announced.

As part of the restructuring, Karyn Saemann, editor of The Gazette, will also serve as regional editor for APG-Southern Wisconsin, directing editorial operations for the groups five additional daily publications and its nine weekly print and digital publications. Other editors who assumed new leadership roles with APG-Southern Wisconsin include Madeline Westberg, Brian O’Connor and Tim Seeman.

Paul Gaier, who worked for two decades as an advertising director and publisher at several Illinois newspapers, has joined Adams Publishing Group as regional president for Northern Wisconsin.

Gaier began his newspaper career in Chippewa Falls, where his father was publisher, before leaving to attend college at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. Most recently, he served as general manager of Fond du Lac-based Action Printing since 2020. Prior to that role, he was regional vice president for a group of Illinois newspapers that included the Rockford Register Star and the (Peoria) Journal Star.

John Leacock, who started his career in 1994 at a Wisconsin newspaper, has been named interim business editor for the Albuquerque Journal, where he has served as a copy editor since October.

A native of Barbados, Leacock moved to Wisconsin after graduating from Columbia College in New York. He worked as an editor for Point Publications in Stevens Point and as a reporter for the Central Wisconsin Radio Network and Wisconsin Public Radio. In 1999, he joined the Wisconsin State Journal as a copy editor. He went on to serve as interim national foreign editor and assistant news editor before joining the Florida Times-Union, where he worked as a metro night editor and copy editor.

Former Wisconsin reporter Dave Newbart has been named managing editor of news for the Chicago Sun-Times. Newbart has been with the Sun-Times for the past five years, serving as the interim managing editor for the last 11 months and previously as the deputy managing editor, news and city desk editor.

He previously held leadership roles with the Chicago Reader and DNAInfo/Chicago. From 1993-1997, he worked as a reporter for The (Madison) Capital Times, where he covered the University of Wisconsin and higher education in Wisconsin and was the newspaper's lead reporter during the 1994 campaign for governor.

Former Milwaukee-based data reporter Kevin Crowe has joined The Washington Post as a data reporter embedded with the Climate team, the newspaper has announced.

Crowe, a bilingual journalist who for the last four years worked for the USA Today Investigations team, previously worked as a data reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, inewsource in San Diego and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.