This article is part of The Poynter 50, a series reflecting on 50 moments and people that shaped journalism over the past half-century — and continue to influence its future. As Poynter celebrates its 50th anniversary, we examine how the media landscape has evolved and what it means for the next era of news.
Before ProPublica won seven Pulitzer Prizes, before it exposed power abuses at every level of government, before it ushered in a wave of nonprofit startups hoping to replicate its success — in short, before it became the journalism behemoth it is today, ProPublica was an outline scribbled on the back of an envelope.
It was November 2006, and Marion and Herbert Sandler had just sold Golden West Financial for $25.5 billion. They were looking to expand their philanthropy, and investigative journalism — a field struggling amid newsroom cutbacks — caught their interest.
“They were interested in donating $10 million a year to support investigative reporting, and they were talking to everyone they knew in journalism … to get advice on what to do,” said Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s founding editor-in-chief, CEO and president.
Steiger, then the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, was “thrilled” to be consulted. He grabbed one of his wife’s business envelopes and sketched what would become the core structure of ProPublica: a web-based investigative newsroom that would make its stories freely available to other news organizations.
Steiger’s ideas were a significant departure from existing models. At the time, the most prominent investigative nonprofits — the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Public Integrity — either worked through freelancers or produced reports that other outlets would cover.
That approach, Steiger said, limited visibility. When newspapers covered those reports, they were often buried inside the paper. But if outlets were given full rights to ProPublica’s stories, they’d be incentivized to republish them on the front page.
“We knew that when we had something unique, rather than having it be a white paper that somebody could report on, that our partners would give those stories strong play,” Steiger said. “As a result, they would have more visibility, and we would have more visibility.”
Or, as ProPublica’s founding general manager Richard Tofel put it: “One story on page one was worth 10 stories on page 10.”
The Sandlers loved the idea, and wanted Steiger to run it. He said, “Hell yes.”
From left to right: ProPublica founding general manager Richard Tofel; founding editor-in-chief, CEO and president Paul Steiger; and founding managing editor Stephen Engelberg. Steiger came up with ProPublica’s structure in 2006, envisioning a web-based, investigative newsroom that would make its stories freely available to other news organizations. (Courtesy: ProPublica)
By 2008, just as ProPublica was launching, the global economy came crashing down, gutting traditional newsrooms. While legacy outlets slashed investigative teams, the Sandlers’ funding allowed ProPublica to build a newsroom of roughly 25 people from the start. Interest was overwhelming — more than 1,100 people applied for those initial jobs. Many of ProPublica’s early hires came from the Los Angeles Times, which was in financial turmoil.
Among its early stories was an exposé into a federally funded Arab-language television network, an investigation into the risks of fracking and a 2009 chronicle of deaths at a New Orleans hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — co-published with The New York Times and winner of ProPublica’s first Pulitzer.
“There was an awful lot of fear and loathing in the journalism world because nobody knew what was going to happen next,” said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s founding managing editor and now its editor-in-chief. “But we were very lucky because we had the Sandlers guaranteeing our budget over the first three years.”
In 2010, ProPublica ramped up efforts to diversify its funding. Within a few years, the Sandlers’ contribution shrank from 85% of ProPublica’s budget to 10%. Even as ProPublica’s budget has grown — it approaches $50 million this year — it has run an operating surplus every year.
As ProPublica grew, its influence spread. Engelberg recalled getting calls from aspiring newsroom founders from as far away as Israel, China and Australia. In the U.S., nonprofit newsrooms sprang up by the hundreds. Some, like The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project, took inspiration from ProPublica.
The success of ProPublica and some of its peers has sparked unqualified support for nonprofit models in some media circles, leaving for-profits feeling pressured to justify their structure. But nonprofit status isn’t a panacea, and many nonprofit newsrooms have shuttered. What ProPublica showed was that the model can work and that audiences will pay for excellence.
Early on in ProPublica’s history, it began publishing reports detailing the impacts its stories had. The latest report, for example, highlights a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a result of ProPublica’s reporting on undisclosed gifts to the justice.
The decision to measure success by impact — not clicks, pageviews, ad sales, subscriptions or any other metric — is ProPublica’s other major contribution to nonprofit journalism, said Engelberg.
“If you can show that what you are doing makes a difference and has impact, you will get more donors,” Engelberg said. “Every year that we did really important investigative reporting, the donations went up.”
“There’s a correlation between journalistic quality and economic outcome,” he added, “and that is really exciting. I think we certainly paved the way a bit in that regard, and I’m proud of that.”
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