Journalism still offers up a few perks these days. When you get shut out of Antiques Roadshow, for instance, a press pass more than makes up for the disappointment of not getting one of the coveted 5,000 or more tickets distributed in a lottery for Saturday morning’s taping at the Alliant Energy Center. We didn’t even have to grovel. The call seeking coverage came like manna from heaven to the newsroom on Monday.

Early Saturday morning, Julie and Fred Loshaw loaded up an old sewer pipe and a child’s wagon and left their home near Belleville. They were headed for Madison and the popular PBS television show “Antiques Roadshow,” which was being produced in the city for the second time in nine years. The Loshaws were among the lucky 5,000 people chosen out of 22,458 who applied for free tickets to attend the show at the Alliant Energy Center and have two pieces appraised. By 9 a.m. they were in line with thousands of others.

For the first time, enrollment in Medicaid, the state’s health insurance plan for the poor, has exceeded 1 million people. Coverage for childless adults, which begins Wednesday, is expected to add more than 40,000 people to the rolls. But critics ask whether the state can afford to keep its commitment to BadgerCare Plus and the people who rely on it.

Hoping to find out why Black Earth Creek hasn’t fully recovered after a massive fish kill eight years ago, conservation officials plan to install monitoring stations that will let anyone — hydrologists and anglers alike — view current conditions in the prized trout stream.

Neighborhood House, the 93-year-old community center in Madison’s Greenbush neighborhood, won’t be opening a beer garden this fall as planned to raise money for an enterprise struggling in recent years with finances and focus.

Rolf Wegenke is the first to admit that some working in the realm of higher education can be a bit, um, set in their ways. So when the president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (WAICU) — which comprises 20 private, nonprofit institutions of higher learning in the state — first broached the idea of a marketing campaign to promote the virtues of the membership schools, his pitch was met with a bit of trepidation.

Madison police charged five young men who allegedly took part in a large fight early Friday morning in a Verona Road gas station parking lot — a melee that left one man in critical condition with a head injury at a Madison hospital and two others with stab wounds.

Kobina Amuah moved from Ghana 25 years ago to Madison where he is now a staff member at the UW Memorial Library.

Madison might use its Affordable Housing Trust Fund to help low-income residents who face sharp rent increases due to a cut in a federal rent subsidy program. Alds. Bridget Maniaci and Michael Schumacher are exploring whether to tap the $4.3 million trust fund to help tenants who rely on federal Section 8 vouchers to cover part of their rent.

Madison police chief Noble Wray wants to send more officers after gang members, and he plans to talk to the mayor next week about an initiative to make that possible. A recent assessment by the police department’s two-officer Gang Unit indicated more than 900 confirmed Madison gang members and another 500 people considered associates of gang members.