Across the vast expanse of social media and blogs within the sea that is the internet, the majority of stories that float to the surface revolve around popular culture, celebrity news, entertainment news, sports, lists, quizzes, stories about pets, and a few high-profile crimes. Do you ever wonder what happened to investigative reporting? Where are the Woodward and Bernstein of the internet age? As news media outlets are facing tough economic times, they are forced to put investigative reporting on the back burner because it requires a lot of resources and time that their budget won’t allow for. While news companies like CNN, which became the model for the 24 hour news cycle, are firing investigative reporters, a non-profit news organization called ProPublica is carrying the torch by reporting on hot button issues and interacting with the community to shed light where stories need to be told.
ProPublica’s mission is “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 through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.”
Based in Manhattan, ProPublica began publishing stories in June 2008 under the direction of its founder Paul Steiger,the former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. It Is now run by Stephen Engelberg, the former investigative editor at the New York Times, and Richard Tofel, the former assistant editor of the Wall Street Journal. ProPublica has about 45 reporters in their newsroom.
Being a non-profit organization, ProPublica relies in part on donations for some
of their funding. Their website features a donation page with a short blurb about their cause. They also make use of ad space in the margins of their pages. They also have had 115 publishing partners that can reprint and localize their stories, many of which are republished for free. ProPublica boasts that 85 cents per dollar they spend goes to reporting while other major news outlets invest 15 cents on every dollar they spend on reporting.
Most of the content produced by ProPublica is in text format and there are very few videos on their site. However, they do have a YouTube account where they post a fair amount of video content. There is also a Data page on their site that features news applications, infographics, and data reports for more of a visual approach to sharing their facts. They also make the data available for purchase and download.
ProPublica is different from other sites we’ve discussed in class because they focus on new stories rather than covering the same thing every other news outlet is focused on. The stories they publish are heavily fact based and don’t have many, if any, opinion pieces. As investigative reporters, the journalists at ProPublica treat their investigations as ongoing and frequently update what they call “Our Investigations” page, which features 50 topics, each topic containing numerous articles written on the subject. For example, some of the topics include patient safety, censorship and surveillance, Guantanamo Bay, Doctors and Big Pharma, America’s racial divide, sex and gender equality, dark money, guns, and college debt, merely 10 of the 50 topics they cover. This aggregation style of categorizing their stories makes it much easier for readers that want more information to find it.
ProPublica does a decent job at avoiding bias, at least in their headlines or which side of the argument they’re on. Under the topic of “Guns,” there are 22 related articles, most of which focus on mental health and guns, PTSD, where Congress stands in the current debate, and what politicians are saying.
There is also the ProPublica Nerd Blog which features “Secrets for data journalists and newsroom developers.” Many of the posts on the blog are written by ProPublica reporters or interns about their experiences and tips for other reporters. For example, “Reporting Recipe: How to Investigate Health Professionals” is a guide for reporter on how to check information on medical professionals by state.
According to Alexa, an analytics website that ranks and collects data from other websites, ProPublica.org ranks at 5,019 in the United States and 22,282 globally, while sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Yahoo are in the top five nationally. To compare to another news site, the New York Times is ranked 29 nationally.The site’s bounce rate, or visits that result in a single page view, is 75.40 percent, which isn’t great. The estimated amount of page views per visitor is 1.74 and the estimated time spent on the site is 2:48, much less than the time needed to fully engage with most of their content.
Alexa’s statistics show that within the last 12 months, the most common audience Propublica reached were female and/or graduate students. The browsing location of ProPublica’s audience is primarily from home followed by the workplace.
ProPublica’s search engine traffic, based on the last three months, is at 12.30 percent, and has been declining since April of 2014 when it was closer to 19 percent. The most common sites users visit before arriving at ProPublica are Google, Facebook, and Reddit. The most popular keywords that brought people there were “covered California,” “Carmen segarra,” “World of Warcraft,” “Fracking,” and “Hydraulic fracturing.” World of Warcraft is obviously the outlier there. It makes sense that a sizeable amount of their views come from Facebook where their page has 96,700. Their Twitter is much more active than their Facebook though with 351,000 followers and 31,500 tweets.
ProPublica’s Twitter traffic may be a result of ProPublica’s “#muckreads,” a hashtag that focuses on holding officials and corporations accountable when they abuse power or betray public trust. Twitter users are allowed to submit stories by emailing them to ProPublica or by tweeting stories with the hashtag “#muckreads,” a nod to the muck raker journalists of the early 20th century that influenced social reform. ProPublica’s twitter retests anything of value that should be shared. There is also a MuckReads podcast for those interested.
Another way ProPublica interacts with the community is by allowing people to contribute to investigations through a program called “Get Involved” where users sign up via email to receive information about upcoming investigations and ways they can provide information to further the investigation.
ProPublica was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for Investigative Reporting and again in 2011 for National Reporting, as well as many other awards which can be seen on their awards page.
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