Connect the Dots 101

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post

Informed voters are increasingly an endangered species. ProPublica’s nonprofit model could help save them.

The plight of the news business has gotten steadily worse over the past decade….

Many national newspapers are losing subscribers (and hollowing out their coverage), and local media has been shriveling for years….

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.”…

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….

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 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/