Motto | Journalism in the Public Interest | ||||||
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Founded | 2007 | ||||||
Type | 501(c)(3) | ||||||
Focus | Investigative Journalism | ||||||
Location | |||||||
Area served
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United States | ||||||
Key people
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Paul Steiger, Executive Chairman Herbert Sandler, Founding Chairman Stephen Engelberg, Editor-in-Chief Richard Tofel, President, Robin Fields, Managing Editor |
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Employees
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< 50 | ||||||
Slogan | Journalism in the public interest | ||||||
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Website | www.propublica.org |
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Alexa rank | 36,894 (September 2012[update]) |
Current status | Active |
ProPublica is a non-profit corporation based in New York City. It describes itself as an independent non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. In 2010, it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece written by one of its journalists and published in The New York Times Magazine as well as on ProPublica.org. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time investigative reporters and the resulting stories are given away to news "partners" for publication or broadcast. In some cases, reporters from both ProPublica and the news partners work together on a story. ProPublica has partnered with more than 90 different news organizations.
On August 5, 2015, Yelp announced a partnership with the company to help improve their healthcare statistics.
ProPublica was the brainchild of billionaires and major Democratic donors Herbert and Marion Sandler, the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, who have committed $10 million a year to the project. The Sandlers hired Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, to create and run the organization as editor in chief. At the time ProPublica was set up, Steiger responded to concerns about the role of the Sandlers' political views, saying on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer:
Coming into this, when I talked to Herb and Marion Sandler, one of my concerns was precisely this question of independence and nonpartisanship...My history has been doing "down the middle" reporting. And so when I talked to Herb and Marion I said "Are you comfortable with that?" They said, "Absolutely." I said, "Well, suppose we did an expose of some of the left leaning organizations that you have supported or that are friendly to what you've supported in the past."They said, "No problem." And when we set up our organizational structure, the board of directors, on which I sit and which Herb is the chairman, does not know in advance what we're going to report on.