News Is a Bu$iness — Or Is It?
Part Four: ProPublica and the Marshall Project, the Ne Plus Ultra
This is awards season in journalism, when the output of news organizations is compared and achievement honored. While no competition is completely free of outside pressure and influence, news prizes are the real deal in measuring accomplishment.
Which is why the record of ProPublica in investigative reporting and The Marshall Project covering criminal justice is so impressive. These two still relatively new, nonprofit, digital-first newsgatherers are on every major list of finalists and winners and have been for several years.
Recently, three 2023 George Polk Awards went to the New York Times and three also went to ProPublica — for national reporting; medical reporting, in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Post–Gazette; and podcasts, in collaboration with Serial Productions at the New York Times and WPLN in Nashville.
A recent Washington Post story about plans for The Marshall Project’s staff to unionize said, “The organization has won two Pulitzer Prizes, doubled its staff over five years to a head count of about 75, and last year started a local news network in Jackson, Miss., and the launch of its first in Cleveland. Funded primarily through donations and grants, the organization reported revenue of more than $15 million, according to recent tax records.” For a full account of accolades, The Marshall Project has them on its website.
The story about joining a union also had this unusual staff comment: “It’s ultimately an act of deep caring and deep respect for each other and for the organization,” said Anna Flagg, a senior data reporter.
What is so remarkable about ProPublica and The Marshall Project, and their record and reputation for excellence, is what they reflect about the upheaval in journalism in the past fifteen years or so. The notion that nonprofit startups — essentially the vision of their founders — would become essential partners to the country’s most important established news outlets is as encouraging as the news about the business of journalism has been grim.
The multi-million-dollar investments in the for-profits of this era that have gone bust, despite being backed by private equity and celebrity investors, are especially ironic when compared to the origin stories of ProPublica and The Marshall Project, which are little known and even less understood.
As it happens, I know those stories and the people behind them well, as a fellow traveler of beliefs and instincts about the role of news – news as distinct from the pursuit of fame and fortune, which so often seems to be the goal of entrepreneurs.
Here briefly are those stories with links to the details to be found at the ProPublica and Marshall Project websites.
ProPublica:
In 2007, as the impact of journalism’s financial apocalypse was becoming clear and a national economic crisis was at hand, Herb and Marion Sandler, the co-CEOs of Golden West Financial Corporation and World Savings Bank, drafted memos to each other and their advisers about concerns over diminishing resources for investigative journalism.
The Sandlers were billionaires, from money they made over decades in banking. They were generous supporters of Human Rights Watch, which had turned the well-meaning advocacy of human rights into a formidable model of an NGO’s impact on civil society.
On the Sandlers’ list of potential leaders for this effort was Paul Steiger, who was nearing the mandated retirement age of sixty-six as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Paul composed a plan for the enterprise, which landed on the name ProPublica, to be an independent, digitally based investigative reporting newsroom.
Paul recruited Richard Tofel, who had been an executive at the Journal handling matters of law and sensitive aspects of business and media relations, to lead that side of the enterprise and Steven Engleberg, the editor of the Oregonian and formerly of the New York Times, to be editor-in-chief.
The Sandlers committed $30 million, $10 million a year for three years, to get launched. That much money is obviously an enormous asset — but in the nonprofit world, so large an amount to spend carries risks of profligacy and arrogance.
Paul, Dick, and Steve immediately established the standards and values of integrity which to news organizations are indispensable — but harder to maintain when your owners are looking to turn a concept into a profit-making return to themselves and their fellow investors.
From the outset, ProPublica collaborated with major and smaller news organization providing them with reporting and data resources that went beyond their own, especially as those were in decline.
So here we are in 2024. Paul and Dick have moved on and continue as mentors and advisers. Steve Engelberg remains in place, joined by Robin Sparkman, now the president.
ProPublica is running on an annual budget of more than $40 million. The Sandler money has long since been replaced and funding is ample, although never enough and always at risk of being misspent.
Why has ProPublica done so well? The answer is the compatible values of its founders, the Sandlers and Paul Steiger; the leadership skills of Paul, who, in Dick and Steve, found partners with temperaments matching his own energy and creativity; and the staffs they have assembled.
Wow.
The Marshall Project, as its founder Neil Barsky acknowledges, “stands on the shoulders of ProPublica.” That is true. Neil worked for Paul at the Journal. He left journalism and started a hedge fund that did well enough for him to pursue other objectives. I met him when I was the vice chairman of the perpetually strapped Columbia Journalism Review and he was its largest individual donor.
Neil explains his concept of The Marshall Project on the wesbite. It is original — a personal tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall and focused on criminal justice reporting so thorough that it can bring about changes. Neil describes himself as peripatetic in his activities. While imagining Marshall, he spent years making a documentary about Mayor Ed Koch — my sense is that Neil liked Koch’s edgy sensibilities.
Here is where the origins of ProPublica and Marshall diverge. Neil pledged $1 million for two years as the start-up funding and committed to doing what was necessary to raise additional funds. And then he recruited two people to fulfill his vision. He called Bill Keller, who had led the New York Times, recognizing that an editor of such renown would give his project credibility — which it instantly did.
And as president, he named Carroll Bogert from Human Rights Watch where she had worked for eighteen years in communications and as deputy executive director for external relations. Before that she had been a China and Moscow correspondent at Newsweek. (Carroll and I have been bonded in the same extended family for fifty years. You want to know more about Carroll? Come sit by me.)
After Bill left, Susan Chira from the Times became editor-in-chief.
When the subject of success in this extraordinarily complicated fraught period in journalism is mentioned, ProPublica and The Marshall Project are invariably the ne plus ultra.
Why? Because of the vision of the founders, the leadership skills and values they identified in their colleagues, and the capacity to raise and deploy money responsibly, showing that it is possible to succeed. But ask any one of these people, how they do it? It is never, ever easy they say, which is why it is so admirable.
Next week: Consider the case of Politico and Axios.
This is GREAT, Peter ...btw, we had the to founders of ProPublica up to lunch last year at The Silurians:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_BdrC4MiME&t=1354s
A peek behind the curtain
By David A. Andelman
The astonishing revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas began with a threat from Paul Steiger’s wife.
The longtime managing editor of The Wall Street Journal was on the cusp of retirement, having reached the ridiculous compulsory retirement age of 65. “My wife said the first time I find you at home in sweatpants, it’s not divorce, it’s murder,” Steiger recalled to a packed luncheon meeting of Silurians at the National Arts Club in September. “And lo and behold, I got a phone call from a billionaire couple named Herb and Marion Sandler.”
They were giving away boatloads of cash and felt a “growing need for investigative reporting.” How about, say, $10 million a year, just to get you started? Steiger said yes to the offer. And so, 15 years ago, ProPublica—which this year unfurled those headline-making Thomas reports—was born.
Enter Stephen Engelberg, editor of the Portland newspaper The Oregonian, whose Pulitzer entries had caught Steiger’s eye, following a stellar career as a New York Times correspondent in early post-communist Poland, followed by a star turn as The Times’ investigative editor. He became the founding managing editor of Steiger’s fledgling enterprise and is now its editor-in-chief.
Some 1,100 resumes promptly flooded in as soon as it became known what kind of game was afoot. Real estate mogul Sam Zell, owner of the Los Angeles Times, only helped the process by suggesting to his staff, “If I say you put f’in puppies on the f’in front page that’s what it’ll be.” Not surprisingly, of the first 18 hires, a half dozen were from the Los Angeles Times.
Then there was the “secret sauce.” As Engelberg put it, you hire “curious, energetic people, send them in promising directions, and let them follow their instincts. The story should come from the bottom up, not the top down.”
One of the first was Sheri Fink’s scoop in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—the inside story of a leading New Orleans hospital where doctors played god, injecting with lethal doses of morphine patients they thought might not be capable of fleeing flood waters rising inexorably from floor to floor in the facility.
Steiger said eighteen got the yellow diamonds pinned on them. “A number died.” He said a relative of one patient sent a boat to the third floor window, rescued the patient. Engelberg recalled, “The New York Times decided to put it on the cover of their magazine.”
David A. Andelman, Silurian president emeritus and moderator of the luncheon event (and author of this article), recalled he had voted to award the same piece a National Magazine Award.
An editor at ProPublica must “be more patient than you could imagine,” Engelberg said. “Because great reporters will ultimately—through the chaotic, misdirection, errors, and then redirection—they will find their way. And if you trust great reporters with great ideas, you’re going to end up with stories like this.”
“If there’s any secret source—it boils down to trust your reporters,” Engleberg said. “With almost every success ProPublica ever had, there was a moment where a sane person would have quit before the good stuff arrived.”
The Clarence Thomas investigation began with ProPublica’s top editors musing that 2024 would be “an epochal year for American democracy, Engelberg said, “and we should have a group of people who are thinking about various aspects of the democratic system under threat, or change, or stress.” One of these was the courts. What better court to begin with than the United States Supreme Court?
“We were lucky to be able to search the internet in all kinds of creative ways,” Engelberg recalled. “I will say this, there is an ability now through software to search for people’s photos, people put stuff on Facebook, and it’s out there and we found photos of Harlan Crow…That was a sort of a great starting point. So, we did the first story, and then one of the reporters who was on a television appearance after that got a call from somebody who said, you know, Crow bought Thomas’s mother’s house in his hometown. And we thought, oh, that’s nuts.
“But the reporters got on a plane Monday morning at eight o’clock, got to the courthouse by lunch and had the records by dinner. And there it was. You know, we had to do a lot more work to kind of figure it all out.” But they had it, and indeed it went from there.
Clearly, ProPublica has come a long way from its earliest origins. From 25 editorial employees, it has grown to 180 reporters and editors—while Engelberg’s Oregonian saw its staff shrink to 70 from 420 full time editorial slots. From ProPublica’s first-year budget of $10 million, “coming into the 2016 election, we were planning a 2017 budget of roughly $17 million,” Engelberg said. “So, we had expanded 70% from the Sandler days. After Trump was elected, things changed. And today’s budget is roughly $41 million. It all [still] comes from donations. Basically, the model is somebody other than me on the business side raises lots of money, and I spend it.”
Indeed, there is an entire page on the ProPublica website whose headline is “Steal Our Stories.” That’s precisely what the editors and board of ProPublica want, even as they continue to partner with relevant media around the world—from the Washington Post to The New York Times who often vie to partner on any number of stories, to several Liberian outlets that featured a ProPublica probe of “an American run charity in Liberia, with the people who ran it abusing the children in their care,” said Engelberg. That sent demonstrators into the streets of Monrovia “chanting and waving signs about ProPublica.”
Somewhat surprisingly in these litigious times, ProPublica has been sued, but “we’ve never settled, we have prevailed each and every time, but the expense is not trivial,” Engelberg said. Clarence Thomas and his wife have not been among those who’ve threatened or sued. “We don’t hear much from them, interestingly enough. My sense is that if they have anything to say, we’ll read it in the Wall Street Journal editorial page.”
So, what’s next going into yet another extraordinary election year? Well, ProPublica has been thinking about that. “I think we have to continue to play the role in the democracy that the founders and people expect us to play, which is to be very clearly nonpartisan,” Engelberg said.
What are the unique ProPublica lanes for 2024? “The whole idea of ProPublica was, we don’t want to do a better story by 10% than what other people are going to do anyway,” Engelberg said. “We want to find a lane that hopefully is different and add something to what our very fine colleagues are doing. Money is a big thing for an organization like ours to cover. It’s harder and harder to track it. But you know, my email address is on the internet. If anybody has any brilliant ideas [about] covering 2024, feel free to send them to me.”
Sort of like how they found out about Justice Thomas’s adopted child whose tuition was paid by Harlan Crow. “That came from a teacher in the school,” Engelberg smiled, “So I mean people do call, and we follow up on it, and it is often quite productive.”
David A. Andelman, a Silurians president-emeritus publishes the SubStack site, Andelman Unleashed. ( https://daandelman.substack.com )