Louis Fortis: The Shepherd Express Publisher Finally Agrees to be Interviewed

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Among his many interests and positions, Louis Fortis is the owner and publisher of the Shepherd Express. A rather humble man, he was reluctant to do an interview with me, but, over several months, I finally convinced him. “When I was in politics, I worked hard to get interviews, but those days are over,” he told me. “I am proud of what I’ve done in my life so far. I’ve worked very hard, sacrificed a lot. But I’m kind of shy talking about my accomplishments. But I suppose you will get it out of me.”

As an older guy, Fortis still has a runner’s body and seriously exercises every day as he has for over 40 years. He has always focused on health and served as treasurer of the Outpost Coop in the ‘90s. Louis is an economist, Ph.D. educator, entrepreneur, international consultant, expert witness and a former Wisconsin State Legislator who served three terms as a Democratic member in the Wisconsin State Assembly from Milwaukee County. He has also been publisher of the Shepherd Express for over 20 years. The Shepherd Express has a combined readership ofslightly over 225,000 readers from the magazine, website, social media and daily e-newsletter according to a third-party survey group.  

I wanted to interview Fortis because his life has been unique, a classic American success story, a living example of what is good about our country, the land of opportunity. In other words, what a person can achieve despite starting from almost nowhere. A self-made man who centuries ago, would be referred to as a “Renaissance Man.”

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With your long list of accomplishments, you are proficient in a wide range of fields. Let’s talk about your background, where you grew up and how you ended up out in Massachusetts achieving advanced college degrees and teaching at Smith College.

I was born and raised in Chicago in a rather rough part of the city. When I was one year old, my dad was diagnosed with a serious and rare blood disease. My mother was told that he would die but it would be a couple years later. He had 168 blood transfusions over three years. He died when I was four years old and my brother was eight. This was a time when a lot of people were moving to the suburbs, but my mother didn’t have the resources to move our family to the suburbs. I tell people, “I’m proud to say I went to some of the worst schools America has to offer, inner city Chicago public schools.” I was a skinny kid in a tough school and a toughneighborhood, but fortunately I was a smart kid. I was also very fortunate to have a wonderful mother. She was always very supportive of me no matter what I wanted to do. I was basically a “good kid” in school and my teachers liked me. I was also a happy kid. Years later, I was told by therapists that I probably sensed my mother had a difficult job in front of her raising two boys as a single mom at that time in our history when the labor market was not particularly good for women, so I tried to be supportive back. You develop a lot of empathy in a situation like I was in. That carried on to school where I would befriend some of the kids that were often picked on. On the down side, I didn’t have a dad to take me to ballgames, for example. After my dad died, my mother went to work in an office job as a clerk typist for Cook County. She had a strong work ethic as the child of immigrants, and she ultimately retired as the secretary to the Chief Judge of the Criminal Division of Cook County.

Through this process of schooling, you were very intelligent, studied hard and earned good grades. You graduated near the top of your class at a large public high school.

My Chicago high school had slightly over 1,000 kids in just my class. We moved to Wisconsin in my last year in high school, but my last year in Chicago, I was ranked third in my class. I also skipped 7th grade so besides being a skinny kid, I was about a year younger than most of my classmates. As I mentioned, growing up I had a very loving homelife located in a fairly rough neighborhood. Those were tough streets. But we kids did not have guns. There were knives, baseball bats, fists. Being a skinny kid, it wasn’t too smart getting into too many fights, so I had to learn other skills. As a kid in an inner-city neighborhood of a large city, your neighborhood is all you know so you have to learn how to navigate it. You learn to negotiate and build alliances at a very young age and develop some friends who “would look out for me.” The parents didn’t have the time to be active in our recreational activities, so we learned how to make it work by ourselves. Learning those skills at a very young age have been invaluable for me. 

Fortunately, school was always very easy for me. The academic gift I have is mathematics. I never got lower than the 97th percentile in math on the standardizedachievement tests they gave us every few years starting in the third grade and on the ACT college exam and Graduate Record Exam. To this day, I can be very analytical, very strategic, and I am a good problem solver. It is almost instinctive. At the same time, I have great difficulty following any kind of written instructions and directions. Also, and I don’t know if this is genetic, but I am very fortunate to be a very upbeat and positive person.

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You went onto the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point for your undergrad work.

Yes, and I graduated with a degree in the broad field of Social Science and a math minor. After college, I taught junior high school math for one year, and then, I applied to VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, which was the domestic version of Peace Corps. I ended up in Milwaukee as a Community Organizer with my first assignment working on Second and Clark. I loved it.

You came of age in an America steeped in controversy, anti-war and social protests, women’s rights, the war on poverty, civil rights, the changing upheaval. This would have been in the very early 1970s. 

Yes, it certainly was an interesting time to come of age. I became very idealistic, energized and committed to social justice. I worked in VISTA for two and a half years. My last work as a VISTA organizer was helping set up a neighborhood group in the Riverwest community called ESHAC that lasted over 20 years. The Milwaukee city planners had written off Riverwest as a dying community. We didn’t accept that. We organized the community starting with fighting city hall over their plan to expand the Locust Street boulevard from Holton Street to the river which would have wiped out all of the storefronts on Locust Street. After we won that fight with city hall and the neighborhood residents saw a victory, things began to move forward. The neighborhood set up a cooperative grocery store after the last privately owned grocery store in the neighborhood closed and no other grocery chain would set up in Riverwest. Today Riverwest is a vital and exciting area of the city. 

Then what did you do? 

After that experience, I went off to graduate school in economics at the University of Massachusetts with very little money and no idea where I was going to sleep when I got to Amherst, Mass. I did not know a soul there nor had ever been to Massachusetts. Looking back, I have no idea how I thought I would support myself. I chose the UMass economics department because they were the leading program in America that took a much broader approach to economic theory. It was more similar to a European model of political economy, more like the London School of Economics. I earned my master’s and doctorate degrees in Economics. That was a great experience.

 In that era of social unrest that you describe and with the organizing I did in Milwaukee, it was very clear to me that almost everything came back to economics. I thought if I am going to be effective in policy and social change, I needed to have a thorough understanding of the economy.  My views on social and economic justice did not change much, but I could explain and defend these positions with sound economic knowledge.

Anyway, I earned my Ph.D. and then taught at Smith College, which was and may still be the largest all- woman’s college in the country. It is one of the elite “Seven Sisters Schools” where Gloria Steinem, Julia Child and Reagan’s wife Nancy went to college along with our Senator Tammy Baldwin. I thoroughly enjoyed my time teaching at Smith and got very strong teacher evaluations from the students, but I didn’t want to get sucked into the very comfortable lifestyle of a professor at an elite private college. After my contract was over, I was offered another contract at Smith, but I respectfully turned it down and never regretted that decision.

And how did you end up living in Madison and later Milwaukee again?

I had known Lee Dreyfus, former Governor of Wisconsin, from my time as a student at UW Stevens Point a decade earlier when Dreyfus had been chancellor. I was involved in student government. We liked each other. We didn’t agree on most issues, but he would invite me to his office to discuss and debate issues. As many of you know, he was a former UW debate professor and he used to tell me how much he enjoyed our little debates. He was a tough guy to pin down on some issues. When it came to applying for graduate school, Dreyfus wrote one of my letters of reference for my application to UMass.

So, when he was running for governor, I was teaching at Smith College. I contacted him and asked him if he won his election, what he was planning to do with economic development in lower income areas like our inner-city neighborhoods, low-income rural areas and our 11tribes. He said that he hadn’t given that much thought. Inner city economic development was one of my fields of specialty and the area I had written my dissertation, and he was aware of that. I told him that as governor he needed focus on the economic development throughout the state and not just in the more prosperous areas. He had to strategically put money into the poorer urban neighborhoods, the poor rural areas, and the Native American tribes. I told him I’d be willing to leave Smith College, come back to Wisconsin, and set up a program in Community Economic Development. While at Smith College, I would go into Boston once a week to work with a group of economists and community organizers to develop Community Economic Development legislation that a Boston inner-city state legislator Mel King would then introduce.

So, what happened?

As you know, Dreyfus won, and I left Smith College and came back to Wisconsin. However, when I returned to Wisconsin, Dreyfus had not told his cabinet staff about our conversation, so no one knew who I was or what Dreyfus had agreed to. I was given just a three month grant to make something happen in the area of Community Economic Development. Dreyfus’s top aid later told me that they thought I would use that time to find a different job. Despite having virtually no money, I never worried about making a living. I was always more interested in helping make some positive social change. Long story short, I worked with individuals I knew in Milwaukee from my pre-graduate schoolwork along with a couple of Ph.Ds. in Madison and we developed draft legislation that a Milwaukee legislator introduced in the assembly, and I lobbied it through both chambers of the legislature. We created a public-private, quasi-state development authority called the Wisconsin Community Development Finance Authority that also had 501(c)3 tax status. What legislator is against economic development and job creation especially in low-income areas, so the bill passed with a big majority in the assembly and unanimously in the state senate. 

I then got appointed as executive director and reappointed when Tony Earl became governor. I did that job for almost five years in the mid-1980s. In these five years, we worked with two-thirds of the Native American tribes, and this was before they had gambling. It became kind of a national model for a state-created public/private partnership to address economic development in distressed areas. Legislators from three other states interested in Community Economic Development invited me to speak to their colleagues.

So, you had access to public funds provided by the state to help these people?

Not exactly. This was 1982 and we were in a recession, so the legislature took most of the money out of the legislation and when it passed there was only a modest start up loan from the state. As I mentioned, it was “a public/private partnership” and we successfully got 501(c)3 status from the IRS which makes any money donated to this effort tax-exempt on Federal taxes. I spent the next year and a half putting together a quasi-state agency and raising $2,700,000 in the middle of a recession. I want to make it very clear, I did not do that single-handedly.

And along the way, you also did other work, right?

So far in my life, I’ve had nine different careers, anyone of them could have been a lifelong career, but nine were more fun. About a third of those professions were part-time. In the early 1980s, at the encouragement of an economics professor friend at UWM I started doing consulting as an economist in legal cases as a side job. For example, in a lawsuit I would be hired to calculate the damages in monetary terms. If the damages were personal injury, for example, I would calculate the lost earning capacity. I would project out the loss to retirement age and discount it back to present value. That gave the attorneys a number to fight over. I consulted in over 250 cases in Wisconsin over a 22-year period, sitting for well over 150 depositions and about 80 courtroom testimonies. I loved the depositions because of the challenges. The courtroom testimony was a bit stressful.  

While you were running the Wisconsin Community Development Finance Authority and doing some economist consulting, you then ran for state office as the Democratic Assemblyman for the 11th Assembly District for the northeastern Milwaukee area.

Yes, in 1986, I ran for State Assembly and defeated a 15-year incumbent in the primary and then won in the general election. From 1987 to 1993, I served as the State Representative for the 11th Assembly District which was two thirds of Glendale, all of Brown Deer and a northwestern portion of the City of Milwaukee. During that time, I continued to do the expert testimony.  

When you were in the state assembly, what were you trying to do and what were your accomplishments?

First of all, a good legislator takes care of their district’s needs, and I represented the three units of local government so that took up a significant amount of time. I also introduced 11 pieces of economic development legislation. Since we had split government, I could usually get the legislation through both chambers because it was hard for my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote against job creating legislation. Our Republican governor at the time, Tommy Thompson, was a big supporter of any economic development legislation so some of my economic development legislation became law. I was also a major supporter of all the environmental legislation the was passed in my time in office.

In my second term, I chaired the second largest committee in the legislature, the Financial Institution and Insurance Committee. That committee covered life and health insurance, savings and commercial banks, credit unions, all of the tort reform issues plus a lot more. A committee chair can only do so much to move legislation along, but a chair can single handedly kill any legislation that is assigned to their committee. I also chaired a select committee on health care financing.

You left the legislature in 1993. How did that come about?

Redistricting happened after the 1990 census, and my district got chopped up into four pieces by the courts that drew the legislative maps in 1992. I ran for State Senate, and I lost to a close friend, our current Congresswoman Gwen Moore, who is still a close friend to this day. One thing I learned is that it is more fun to win than to lose an election, but if one has to lose, it is easier to lose to a good person like Gwen. As a further consolation, 1992, was the year of the woman, after the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and the terrible treatment Anita Hill experienced. In Wisconsin, I believe that there were about 35 contested primary elections in September 1992 and women won 80% of them, 28 out of the 35. That made the loss a little easier. 

What did you do after you lost the election?

Campaigns absolutely dominate your life so after I lost, I had the time to deal with some personal issues. I was still in office for four more months since the primary loss was in September and my term ended in January. I now had the time to manage my mother’s care who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. My brother and I started paying all her expenses after her savings were exhausted. I was making about $30,000 as a state legislator. I decided it was time to start doing some economic development for Louis. I needed to make some money. I had helped put together economic development projects for community groups and in my pre-legislator days, I now needed to put together a plan for myself. I increased my expert witness work so I had some income, and spent the next couple of years doing some small scale commercial real estate work rescuing and reviving properties that were in foreclosure, but could hopefully be successful if managed properly. 

My first commercial investment was to buy a small strip mall in Madison that was in foreclosure. I took every dollar I had plus money I borrowed from my brother and my ex-girlfriend, and I bought the property. As I mentioned, it was in foreclosure and two banks were involved and they were suing each other. I was able to get between them and I negotiated the purchase from one bank and negotiated with the other bank to provide me the loan. We worked very hard to get a few of the vacant spaces rented that would cover the basic expenses, the debt service and the property taxes. Once that property was successful, we could refinance it and then look for another similar property. 

At some point along the way, you got into the international consulting field. 

Yes, about four years later, I got into international consulting, working on projects funded by the U. S. Agency for International Development, USAID. I always had an interest in world affairs ever since I backpacked through Europe for three months when I was young. I also taught a course in Beirut, Lebanon in 2010, the year before the Arab Spring, entitled “Global Shifts in the World Economy from WWII through the Present” at English-speaking Canadian University.

Regarding the consulting, I did economic development consulting in Bolivia, Slovakia, and Mongolia, and democracy building consulting, which was advising their parliaments, in Bulgaria, Romania, Uganda, Indonesian Borneo, and the West Bank and Gaza right after the Palestinians created the Palestinian Legislative Council and held their first election. For example, in Mongolia, I helped them with their plan to convert from a herder economy to a market economy. When the Afghan and Iraq wars started, the Federal agency money funding my consulting jobs got siphoned off for those wars. That ended my international consulting.

Moving forward, how did you come to be the owner and publisher of the Shepherd Express?

In the mid-1990s after I left the legislature, I did some volunteer work with Ed Garvey, the prominent Madison lawyer. When the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel merged, Garvey was concerned that Milwaukee lost a news source. He wanted broader coverage of the news. He got involved with the Shepherd Express, which was in debt. He even started loaning more money to the Shepherd to pay for the weekly printing to keep it afloat. 

One day, I stopped at Ed’s office and he was very down because his best friend had died. I asked if I could help in any way. He told me to go to Milwaukee and straighten out the Shepherd Express newspaper. I was living in Madison at that time. Ed Garvey had been very involved with the Shepherd Express, and it was losing money. That was the fall of 1997.

As I recall, right around that time, the Shepherd Express was about to shut down.

That’s right. Anyway, I agreed to come to the Shepherd’s offices as an unpaid consultant and spent one day. Looking at the Media Audit numbers, I found the readership was large, well over 200,000, and over 20% of the readers had advanced degrees and the average annual income of a Shepherd reader was above the average annual income of Milwaukee County and the WOW counties. To this day, there are still a number of people who totally misunderstand our demographics. That evening of that first day, there was a Shepherd board meeting. The board members were talking about closing it down. I called Ed Garvey explained what was happening and asked if he could raise more money. Then I went back to the board and asked them to match what Garvey thought he could raise. 

After some handwringing and much guilting, the board members came through with more commitments and they kept the newspaper running. I came back the next week, again as an unpaid consultant for two days. I did that for a few months to try the “right the ship.” Eventually the board wanted me to be publisher and after a couple of years we negotiated a deal for me to buy out the Shepherd Expressinvestors, who were basically liberal attorneys and small business owners. During the 2020 pandemic, we changed our format from a weekly newspaper and website to a monthly glossy news magazine with a strong daily e-newsletter. The news business is a very challenging business, but I think the Shepherd Express plays a significant role in the community. People tell me that all the time, which keeps me going. 

What is the philosophy of the Shepherd Express? I believe it is left-leaning and somewhat progressive. I do know that your audience is largely college-educated. 

Yes. People ask me about the mission statement. I say it is “Moving Milwaukee forward in a progressive way.” We try to support what’s good in our community, for instance, many years ago when the downtown Milwaukee Public Market was an idea, the Shepherd was strongly promoting it even putting the rendering of the future building on the cover. We want to see Milwaukee move forward with a spirit of fairness and social justice. When Pope Francis was selected, we put his picture on our cover with “Pope Francis’ New Moral Course Could Change the World.” We also highlight the individuals, the nonprofits and the businesses that try to make Milwaukee a better place. Milwaukee has a lot of local heroes who are doing great things. Also, we can’t be intimidated. We do not have large outside investors like all the major newspapers and radio stations owned by big corporations. We do not get any grants or subsidies. We struggle financially but we have integrity and can call it the way it is, “without fear or favor” as they say.

Are you a philosophical paradox? You have often advocated funding large social programs supported by liberals—and yet you are a business entrepreneur normally associated with conservatives.

Philosophically or economically, I am a progressive Social Democrat and a capitalist as in the northern European model. Over the years, I have gotten grants from the European Union, the German Marshall Fund, and the Swedish government to study their various economic models. I believe the government needs to set strong rules and let the entrepreneurs go from there. You don’t have government running businesses because the wealthy special interests will ultimately corrupt them. But the government can set the rules on things like environmental standards and workers’ rights. You then need the entrepreneurs, who will work their asses off, to make their businesses and the economy thrive, and the competition to provide consumers choice and keep businesses responsive and honest. It is the small business community that makes a community interesting and great. I’d like to see a better social safety net for people. Also, as both a citizen and an economist, I am appalled by the income inequality in our country. 

You often express your disapproval of inequities in our justice system, but yet you support the police, and the police have even given you awards.

Police are not the problem. The few bad and corrupt police are a huge problem. When I was in the legislature, I would do ride-alongs with the police in Milwaukee. I had great respect for the good cops I rode with. They often handled domestic disputes, for example, like they were therapists. We need good honest police who are in the job for the right reasons. Residents in the poorest, roughest neighborhoods want the police more than anyone. Yes, years ago, the Milwaukee Police Association honored me as Legislator of the Year and later as Publisher of the Year. 

I was surprised to find out you were the founder in 2003 of the annual Milwaukee International Film Festival. How did that come about?

Dave Luhrssen, our arts and entertainment editor and the most sophisticated movie critic in Wisconsin, and I put the film festival together. We were told by many film people that Milwaukee cannot support an International Film Festival and it will fail. Whenever you try to create something whether it is a nonprofit or a small business, there are always many naysayers who will tell you that it will fail. Smile, thank them and go on and make it happen. We started with a ten-day festival in November of 2003. It cost me a lot of money personally, but Milwaukee has been good to me, and I wanted to give something back. If anyone wants to know more about the original film festival’s history, go the Shepherdexpress.com and find the cover story in the November 2023 Shepherd Express magazine that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Milwaukee International Film Festival.

You have dedicated a share of your life to public service. Why public service?  

I came of age in the 1970s when social justice was so important to us young people. We had the civil rights and student rights movements, women’s movement, and, of course, the anti-war movement against the Vietnam War. Also, the environmental movement started in 1970 in Wisconsin. Through the years, most of my work has been in public service. I tell people I’ve had nine careers, some simultaneously. Some examples: My first job out of undergrad college was one year as a junior high school math teacher. When I got to Milwaukee as a Vista Volunteer, I was a community organizer in the central city. I was an economics professor at Smith College. For five years in Milwaukee, I also taught a graduate course each year in Community Development at UWM. Then, I worked six years as a Wisconsin State Assemblyman. My time as an international consultant was also public service. Also, I have served on over 50 nonprofit boards. 

I understand that you are also a kind of counselor and advisor to people.

I spend a lot of time informally helping people. I’m a godfather to some children of certain friends.

Switching gears, what is wrong with our country? Deep divisions in party politics, racism, religion, gender issues, and economic class divide, to name a few. Why is there so much anger and disharmony?

When you have a downturn in the economy like we had with the Great Recession of 2008, people begin to protect their family and friends. They hunker down. In this country, there is a tremendous amount of unfairness. Racism is still a major issue even after over 150 years of emancipation. We still are not a colorblind society. Despite many academics arguing that we don’t have a class system in America, unfortunately we do have a class system. Many of these academics use a very narrow and rigid definition of a class system. Where you grew up, whether your parents graduated from college, what schools you went to, and if your family had health insurance will have a big effect on where you are in life when you are 40 years old. 

Yes, there are avenues to get beyond humble beginnings, but it is much harder than if you grew up in a middle-class environment with good schools and unfortunately it doesn’t work for many people. Currently half of Americans, even those with full-time jobs, can’t handle a $1,000 emergency without having to borrow money. Then they see others, especially on social media, appearing to have very different lives and it doesn’t look fair to them. 

Then there are people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. Does anyone really need to be worth $180 billon? They were able to get rich because of all the monies earlier generations and our current generation put into our infrastructure like schools, universities, highways, airports, hospitals that provided them with opportunities and a trained labor force, and then they think they did it themselves. No, it was the foresight of earlier generations to develop the environment for our future. These mega-wealthy are benefitting from all the work that earlier generations gave to the U.S. and instead of appreciating that, they fight like hell to avoid paying taxes.

Among the most developed countries in the world, the US has one of the worst levels of economic inequality.

Moving on, how do you see the future of the newspaper business?

Actually, publications like the Shepherd Express have morphed into small media companies. We have a publication and a very robust website and a six-day-a-weekdigital newsletter with over 50,000 subscribers and a high open rate. Running a small media company is a difficult game, but independent media are very important, media not controlled by a large corporation or a government entity. Only independent media can truly speak truth to power. Nonprofit media can be independent but can’t be partisan, can’t endorse political candidates. As for me, I believe strongly that news should be free because we need free news for a strong democracy. 

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