ProPublica

• 1. Introduction

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  ProPublica made history in 2010 by becoming the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize. The winning story followed the exhausted doctors of a New Orleans hospital as they made urgent life-and-death decisions while floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina cut them off from the outside world. That single award announced something: a new kind of journalism organization had arrived, one without a printing press, without a broadcast tower, and without the revenue pressures that had long shaped what newspapers chose to investigate.

  ProPublica is an American nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in New York City. Its reporters work full-time, and the stories they produce flow outward to more than 90 partner news organizations for publication or broadcast. The arrangement raises immediate questions. Who pays for journalism that gives itself away? Who decides what gets investigated? And can a newsroom funded by wealthy donors remain truly independent?

• 2. The Sandler Bet

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  Herbert and Marion Sandler were the former chief executives of Golden West Financial Corporation, and ProPublica was their idea. They committed $10 million per year to the project, a level of financial backing that transformed what was possible for nonprofit journalism.

  To run the newsroom, they recruited Paul Steiger, who had served as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Steiger's concern going in was not money but independence. Before accepting, he pressed the Sandlers directly: what would happen if ProPublica investigated left-leaning organizations they had previously supported? Speaking on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Steiger recalled their reply: "No problem." He described his own journalistic history as "down the middle" reporting and said the board of directors, on which he sits and of which Herb Sandler is chairman, does not learn in advance what the organization plans to report.

  Steiger's approach to building the staff drew on the Wall Street Journal pay model. His own salary in 2008 was $570,000, which was half of what his total compensation had been at the Journal. In 2010, eight ProPublica employees earned more than $160,000. Managing editor Stephen Engelberg received $343,463 that year. The highest-paid reporter, Dafna Linzer, formerly of the Washington Post, received $205,445. The newsroom launched with 28 reporters and editors, including Pulitzer Prize winners Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber, Jeff Gerth, and Marcus Stern. Steiger received 850 applications after the organization's founding was announced.

• 3. Funding Beyond the Sandlers

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  The Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Atlantic Philanthropies have all provided funding to ProPublica alongside the Sandler Foundation. The ties to the Knight Foundation run deep in both directions: Paul Steiger serves as a trustee of the Knight Foundation, while Alberto Ibarguen, the Knight Foundation's president and CEO, sits on ProPublica's board.

  Not all funding has been without controversy. ProPublica, along with other major news organizations, received grant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. The newsgroup shares its published work under a Creative Commons no-derivative, non-commercial license, meaning partner organizations can republish ProPublica stories without charge, so long as they do not alter them or use them commercially. In August 2015, Yelp announced a partnership with ProPublica to bring improved healthcare data into Yelp's information on healthcare providers, extending the reach of ProPublica's research into consumer platforms.

• 4. Pulitzer After Pulitzer

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  "The Deadly Choices at Memorial," written by Sheri Fink and published in The New York Times Magazine as well as on ProPublica's own website, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting jointly with the Philadelphia Daily News. That same piece won the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2010.

  In 2011, reporters Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their series The Wall Street Money Machine. That award marked the first time a Pulitzer went to a group of stories not published in print. The streak continued in 2016, when ProPublica and The Marshall Project won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a report examining law enforcement's failures to investigate rape reports and understand the traumatic effects on victims.

  The 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service went to ProPublica and the New York Daily News for a series on the New York City Police Department's use of eviction rules. In 2019, reporter Hannah Dreier won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her series following immigrants on Long Island whose lives were disrupted by a botched crackdown on MS-13. In May 2020, ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on public safety gaps in Alaska, and also won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting that year for coverage of the collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) with civilian vessels in separate incidents in the western Pacific Ocean. T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi wrote those stories.

  In May 2024, ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski, and Kirsten Berg on billionaires giving gifts and paying travel expenses for US Supreme Court justices.

• 5. Investigations That Changed Things

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  In 2016, Julia Angwin led a ProPublica investigation into COMPAS, an algorithm used by US courts to assess how likely a defendant is to reoffend. The investigation found that Black defendants were almost twice as likely as white defendants to be labeled higher risk but not actually reoffend, while white defendants were more likely to be labeled lower-risk but go on to commit additional crimes. The investigation also found that only 20 percent of people predicted to commit violent crimes actually did so. COMPAS developer Northpointe criticized the methodology, and a team at the Community Resources for Justice published a rebuttal, but the investigation sparked a broad public debate about algorithmic decision-making in the criminal justice system. The reporting was later adapted into the 2019 Netflix series Unbelievable, which was based on a collaboration between T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project.

  In June 2021, after receiving leaked IRS documents, ProPublica published a report arguing that tax rates for the wealthiest Americans were significantly lower than middle-class rates when unrealized capital gains are treated as equivalent to earned income. The reporting later revealed that technology investor Peter Thiel had legally accumulated more than $5 billion in a tax-free Roth IRA through investments in private companies. Attorney General Merrick Garland told lawmakers that tracing the source of the IRS leak would be a top priority for the Justice Department. In October 2023, Charles E. Littlejohn pleaded guilty to the unauthorized disclosure of income tax returns.

  In October 2021, ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio published findings on juvenile incarceration in Rutherford County, Tennessee. The statewide rate of incarceration for children referred to juvenile court was five percent; in Rutherford County it was 48 percent. The investigation found that county authorities, operating under direction from Judge Donna Scott Davenport, had charged some children under laws that did not exist. The article was a finalist in the 2022 National Magazine Awards, and the story continued as a podcast called The Kids of Rutherford County.

• 6. Mapping Invisible Harms

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  ProPublica published the results of a two-year analytical project in 2021 examining billions of rows of Environmental Protection Agency data to build a first-of-its-kind map of industrial pollution at the neighborhood level. Across five years of EPA data, the team identified over 1,000 toxic hotspots nationwide and estimated that 250,000 people living near those areas may have faced cancer risk levels the EPA considers unacceptable.

  The town of Verona, Missouri turned up on the map with an industrial cancer risk 27 times greater than the acceptable threshold. Following the publication, the EPA agreed to install three air monitors to track ethylene oxide concentration in Verona. The city of Longview in eastern Texas also appeared prominently; the highest-risk zone in Longview registered a cancer risk level 72 times greater than what the EPA deems acceptable. That area is the location of the Texas Eastman Chemical Plant, which ProPublica's analysis found to be emitting ethylene oxide and 1-3 butadiene. The plant stated that its own tests had revealed no areas of concern.

  In 2023, ProPublica launched an investigative series called The Repatriation Project, examining delays and institutional resistance to returning Native American remains and sacred objects under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. In July 2024, reporter Mary Hudetz received the Richard LaCourse Award for Investigative Journalism from the Indigenous Journalists Association for her work on that series.

• 7. Local Reporting Network

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  Launched in 2018, ProPublica's Local Reporting Network brought together more than 70 local news organizations in a structure designed to direct investigative capacity toward regions that might otherwise lack it. Partner organizations must apply alongside a local news outlet, and the network subsidizes salary and benefits for the reporters involved.

  Partner organizations selected in 2024 include The Current in Georgia, the Idaho Statesman, The Salt Lake Tribune, Street Roots in Oregon, and Tennessee Lookout. Work produced through the network's partnership with the Anchorage Daily News won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for illuminating public safety gaps in Alaska. In 2017, ProPublica also launched the Documenting Hate project to systematically track hate crimes and bias incidents; the project allows victims and witnesses to submit accounts, and news organizations can partner with ProPublica to report stories drawn from the dataset. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for example, partnered with ProPublica to report on hate crimes in Minnesota.