ProPublica: Renewing the Promise of Investigative Journalism

Just came across this web publication, ProPublica, founded by Paul Steiger and Steve Engelberg (pictured) to counteract the loss of investigative journalism in traditional news media. I checked out some of their staff bios and they're impressive -- far better credentials than mine, I'll say that much. Here's their letter to readers posted June 10th:

Five months ago, ProPublica was an idea, a rudimentary Web site and a nearly empty office in Lower Manhattan. Today, we take our first concrete step in building an investigative publishing platform that will produce original stories focusing on betrayal of the public trust and abuse of power.

Our goal is to do stories that would otherwise escape notice and to follow up on work done by others that demands change or is being overlooked.

This is the beginning of what we see as an experiment and we invite your comments and suggestions on stories, or on how we can make our organization more useful to readers.

We have nearly completed our hiring (more than 20 out of perhaps 27 news staff) and reporters are at work on some promising avenues of inquiry. You will see those results in the months ahead.

In the meantime, we offer what we hope will be a thorough, thought-provoking look at investigative stories that are breaking elsewhere.

• Each business day, under the heading “Breaking on the Web,” we’ll aggregate (assemble, digest and link to) all the investigative journalism we can find being produced in the U.S. in English. Whether you’re a reporter, editor, or just an interested reader, we welcome your help in compiling the stories. Please send suggestions to suggestions@propublica.org.
• In some cases, we’ll analyze, comment and follow up on these stories. Eric Umansky and Paul Kiel will lead this effort on our staff, assisted by our reporting and research team.
• We’re also starting a feature we’re calling “Scandal Watch”. It will track the top five investigations (other than our own) at any given moment, selected by our editors and ranked by intensity of coverage.