# ProPublica A nonprofit investigative newsroom founded in 2007, and the most frequently cited independent reporting source in this vault — **67 pages reference its work in prose**, which is why it has a page. ## The model ProPublica is funded by philanthropy rather than advertising or subscriptions, publishes free of charge, and **co-publishes with partner outlets** rather than competing with them. A ProPublica investigation typically runs simultaneously in a major newspaper or broadcast outlet, which is how a newsroom of a few hundred people achieves national reach. That structure is a direct response to the collapse of local and investigative capacity in commercial journalism: investigations are expensive, slow, and produce few stories per reporter-year, which makes them the first thing cut when advertising revenue falls. Removing the revenue dependency was the point. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. It supplies a large share of the vault's primary reporting on institutional conduct.** The subject matter tracks closely with what this knowledge base covers — federal agency conduct, dark money, judicial ethics, military and intelligence programs, insurance and healthcare denial practices, immigration enforcement. Its reporting on Supreme Court justices' undisclosed gifts and travel is the single clearest example of accountability journalism changing a live institutional debate this decade. **2. Its funding model is itself contested terrain.** Philanthropically funded journalism is routinely attacked from the right as ideologically directed by its donors — an argument the vault should record without adopting, since the same argument applies with equal force to donor-funded outlets across the spectrum and is used selectively. The relevant question for any given story is whether it holds up, not who paid for the reporter's salary. **3. It is a case study in what replaced the commercial investigative desk.** The vault's [[Media Hub]] material documents the hollowing of local news and the rise of partisan alternatives. ProPublica is the third path — nonprofit, non-partisan in stated posture, dependent on foundations — and its durability is an open question that matters for whether investigative capacity survives at all. > [!note] Citation hygiene > When a vault page cites ProPublica, the citation should point at the specific investigation, not the outlet. A crude scan of this vault found ProPublica appearing in 29 pages as a bare URL or source-list entry with no prose describing what the reporting found — those are the citations most likely to rot. ## See Also - [[Media Hub]] · [[The Atlantic]] - [[Dark Money]]