The plight of the news business has gotten steadily worse over the past decade. Cable TV networks are shedding audience share at an alarming rate. Increasingly, they seemed to have forgotten who their audience even is. The hosts of “Morning Joe” visiting Mar-a-Lago was the sort of move, judging from the backlash, that is likely to increase its progressive audience’s flight from MSNBC. CNN, in its effort to be all things to all people, is also hemorrhaging viewers. Many national newspapers are losing subscribers (and hollowing out their coverage), and local media has been shriveling for years. (The Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate unleashed an exodus of hundreds of thousands of readers who had expected a clarion voice in defense of democracy.)
It is not merely this shrinkage in conventional news consumption that should be alarming. The preponderance of voters who get no news whatsoever suggests the very notion of an “informed electorate” might become a thing of the past.
However, there is a part of the news ecosystem that seems to be growing by leaps and bounds: nonprofit news, especially the juggernaut ProPublica, which has been responsible for buckets of scoops that for-profit media have missed.
ProPublica has reported on everything from the actual tax rates paid by billionaires to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial scandals to the story of a Georgia woman whose death resulted from the state’s abortion law. It has run stories on everything from how “Opponents of Missouri Abortion Rights Amendment Turn to Anti-Trans Messaging and Misinformation” to how “Tribal College Campuses Are Falling Apart. The U.S. Hasn’t Fulfilled Its Promise to Fund the Schools.” One of its most recent investigations revealed, “Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs.” (You come away wondering what else you are missing relying on for-profit media.)
I recently spoke with Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor. He described the extraordinary expansion of an experiment that began in 2008 with a $10 million budget. Since then, its national coverage and staff (now about 150) have boomed, its budget has increased to $50 million, and it has created hubs across the country to fill the gap in regional and state news. It went from 36,000 donors in 2022 to 55,000 today.
Starting with a single hub in Illinois, it has added others in the South, Southwest, Northwest, Midwest, Texas (in collaboration with the Texas Tribune) and New York. It has received seven Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 15 George Polk Awards in the short time it has operated.
Moreover, ProPublica has pioneered an inventive partnership with local papers all over the country. ProPublica provides an enterprising investigative reporter with salary for a year plus the infrastructure necessary to report the story, including editors, research assistance and lawyers.
“This was a massive shift in what we are doing,” Engelberg says. He is producing a body of work that provides, as he put it, “substantial knowledge all over the country.”
The impact is unmistakable. This year, ProPublica has averaged 11.8 million page views per month on- and off-platform (views on propublica.org and on aggregators such as Apple News and MSN). That represented a jump of 22 percent since 2022. It also just passed 200,000 followers on Instagram and has nearly 130,000 followers on YouTube.
It has partially filled the demand for local reporting that has resulted from the brutal realities of the newspaper industry’s consolidation. But it has also found relevance by being serious and focused, instead of giving way to many legacy media outlets’ impulse to lure back readers with games and frivolous lifestyle columns.
“I would say they are missing the point,” Engelberg says. “You get subscriptions by consistently providing material you can’t get elsewhere.”
In reading the output of ProPublica and its affiliates, I am struck by the density and depth of the reporting. You learn new things, not simply what people are saying about things you already know. Rather than following the same three or four D.C.-centric stories with endless iterations (What does Sen. Tom say about the White House announcement that it would oppose Rep. Jane’s tweet?), ProPublica does not assume its audience wants to hear only about those stories or is allergic to diverse topics.
There are still gaps nationwide. There are places all over the country where granular coverage of local politics is nonexistent. Every day, school board meetings, city councils and other public hearings go unreported. It has become difficult to persuade people to pay for that sort of local coverage.
But perhaps, rather than giving news consumers the equivalent of junk food, meaty coverage about critical events could draw disaffected readers and viewers back. I can only hope, for the sake of our democracy, that ProPublica will spawn imitators and provide competition to spur for-profits to be a better version of themselves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/21/nonproft-journalism-propublica-local-media/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzMyMTY1MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzMzNTQ3NTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MzIxNjUyMDAsImp0aSI6ImE1NmNlNzU3LTMwMDctNGIxNC04MTkxLTJhNDZhNzhkMjUxNSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9vcGluaW9ucy8yMDI0LzExLzIxL25vbnByb2Z0LWpvdXJuYWxpc20tcHJvcHVibGljYS1sb2NhbC1tZWRpYS8ifQ.2YpqaSh2HCEwH8RIf1fwhm1PFvkKl76__1akOOVkzzg