ProPublica

ProPublica is an independent non-profit newsroom, located in Manhattan, New York. In an industry that is primarily owned and operated by large corporations, ProPublica has been successful regarding their mission to produce stories that expose and engage. While popular media outlets reproduce the same stories that contain trivial amounts of research and poorly researched data, ProPublica seeks to revive the investigative journalism that was once popular and influential. Their mission statement to “expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform” (ProPublica), says as much about their philosophy as it does speak for the audience that support them. 

The website and organization is funded nearly entirely through donations, although advertisements are sometimes accepted. Initial funding was primarily supplied by foundations including The Sandler Foundation which offered a multiyear commitment to fund ProPublica during their onset. As of 2012, The Sandler Foundation provided only 38% of their funding for the year, showing substantial growth in public support. For the most part, all content and stories created by ProPublica are offered for free and they even allow reproduction with a small set of guidelines.  

The content is truly where ProPublica has demonstrated their ability to produce the kind of stories that match their mission statement. Awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in 2010 and 2011 for their in-depth coverage of stories that involved months of investigation, ProPublica has demonstrated that long form journalism still grabs the attention of the public. During 2010, the time of ProPublica’s first Pulitzer award, their website page views spiked to over two million hits. This trend continued into 2012 when they published revealing work on SOPA, where they saw nearly 3.5 million views. What is more impressive than these spikes is the consistent rise in views over the short few years that they have been active. As of 2013 their number of unique visitors a month was around 500,000.

In 2013, their annual budget was set at 10 million, of which 85% was directed toward news coverage. When compared to the 15% that is spent by most leading newspapers and magazine, the difference in what matters becomes clear. ProPublica is proving that it is possible to be financially stable while still spending time and money on pursuing long form journalism. 

The founder and executive chairman of ProPublica, Paul Steiger believes his website is “both a destination for journalism and a tool to promote good work” (ProPublica). Their motto describes this as, “Journalism in the Public Interest” (ProPublica). In order to deliver the most thorough investigative work, ProPublica partners with most leading new sources on stories. As of 2013 they had a total of 26 partners. Since then, they have been on the rise with page views up 20%, email subscribers up 9%, application downloads up 25% and twitter followers up 41%. 

Unlike other non-profit news companies such as MinnPost, ProPublica does not focus on region specific stories. Instead they attempt to tackle global stories that effect citizens and their democratic rights. It is for this reason that ProPublica had reached such a wide and varied audience and gained traction in their efforts to become a sustainable business. The most important aspect that ProPublica promotes is that investigative journalism can not only be informative and well-read, but it can be profitable. Their strong moral ethics are the reason that so many foundations have backed them with hopes of changing the news industry. Recently the social news website Upworthy, has teamed with ProPublica in order to make stories that are based around human rights, climate change, and income inequality reach a far wider audience. As efforts to get hard-hitting news to the general public become more popular the corporate owned news companies will either have to change their current methods or close entirely. ProPublica also works to provide storytelling through video, audio, and full text articles which shows great innovation while maintaining the core roots of journalism.

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