ProPublica figures reveal several half a million dollar salaries

Paul Steiger, the editor-in-chief of non-profit investigative news site ProPublica earns a salary of $571,687 (approximately £366,701), according to figures reported by the organisation to the IRS.

In 2009, the organisation employed 47 people and five volunteers. Salaries for senior staff in 2009 included $343,463 for managing editor Stephen Engelberg and $320,978 for treasurer and secretary Richard Tofel.

Steiger is very open about his approach to staff pay, as he told the New York Observer in 2007, “I’m prepared to spend $200,000 on the exact right person, but if the exact right person isn’t there, then I’ll get three people at $60,000.”

Full figures on FishbowlNY…

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ProPublica photographer followed by BP employee, detained by police

Police in England have come in for a fair amount of criticism recently for their treatment of photographers (see here and here), but their US counterparts have received some attention too after detaining freelance photographer Lance Rosenfield, who was working for ProPublica at the time.

Rosenfield was driving away after taking photos of a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas when he was followed by a BP employee, blocked off by two police cars and detained. Rosenfield had remained in a public space outside the refinery while working. The police reviewed his pictures and recorded his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information. According to Rosenfield these details were then shared with BP.

Paul Steiger, editor-in-chief of ProPublica, said:

“We certainly appreciate the need to secure the nation’s refineries. But we’re deeply troubled by BP’s conduct here, especially when they knew we were working on deadline on critical stories about this very facility. And we see no reason why, if law enforcement needed to review the unpublished photographs, that should have included sharing them with a representative of a private company.”

Full story at this link…

via Fishbowl NY blog

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ProPublica: Reporting bank investigations – a cautionary tale

ProPublica managing editor Stephen Engelberg shares some advice on reporting bank investigations.

His advice:

When the journalistic scrum forms around an investigation, read very carefully and withhold final judgments.

He writes:

…Stories about investigations often leave the impression that authorities are running full tilt at malefactors. And they often fail to answer basic questions. Are these investigations fishing expeditions? Pro forma reviews? The first steps toward significant charges?

Full post at this link…

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FT.com: ProPublica and the realities of non-profit news

An intelligent piece by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson that looks at the realities of running a non-profit journalism venture, in this instance ProPublica.

Despite its Pulitzer Prize win, the site still needs the leverage afforded by partnerships with traditional media, says editor-in-chief Paul Steiger: “[O]ne of ProPublica’s biggest stories: on its own website, it attracted 60,000 page views. But on its partner newspaper’s site it was read 1.1m times.”

Yet business models being tested by other for-profit media may not fit the bill for a non-profit news organisation:

In spite of others’ hopes for “tip jar” models, donations from readers have so far been small. An appeal after ProPublica’s Pulitzer win only paid for the celebratory champagne.

Mr Steiger says the online subscription experiments being launched from News International to the New York Times hold little appeal. “We want our stuff to have an impact. It seems a little counterproductive to say ‘pay us’.”

Full story at this link…

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Coders meet journalists; journalists meet coders

Do journalists need to learn to code? Probably not, but those who can are likely to find themselves quickly snapped up by news organisations with interactive and data teams.

I have no grand hopes of learning to code properly, but I would like to feel a little more comfortable with the language and learn more about the ways programmers work and how it could help journalism.

That was one reason I went along to last night’s Ruby in the Pub informal meetup (tagged #RITP or #rubyinthepub on Twitter), initiated by journalists Joanna Geary and James Ball (even though James himself got stuck at work and missed the event).

The other reason was to meet brave souls playing in the programming-journalism no-man’s land. I think there are exciting things to come out of the programmer-journalist relationship. We’re already seeing that in projects led by mySociety and OpenlyLocal, in collaboration with bloggers and other media.

The US, of course, is streets ahead, with news organisations employing designated journalist-programmers. ProPublica, the non-profit investigative organisation, employs application developers and editors, integrated into the news team, as does the Chicago Tribune (for example). The New York Times has a dedicated interactive team – the head of which, Aron Pilhofer, came along to last night’s meet-up (he recently wrote about this new breed of ‘hacker-journalists’ at this link).

Over here, we’re seeing moves in the right direction (the Scott Trust now has a bursary for students who want to learn software development) and of course news organisations do employ developers, designers and programmers, but we’ve got some catching up to do in terms of integrating and prioritising programming skills.

[For some examples of interactives, visualisations and data-driven journalism follow this link]

So…what is Ruby? Ruby on Rails is a open source web application framework, using the Ruby language. Only a minority of programmers use it (you can see a comparison of frameworks at this Wikipedia link), but it was the consensus language agreed for the meet-up.

Developer Dave Goodchild (@buddhamagnet) was restricted by the lack of wifi, but nonetheless he did a grand job in educating us Ruby ignoramuses the very basics.

If you do decide to download RoR to have a proper play, Dave recommends building a blog – the format of which is easy to understand for a journalist – and following this online tutorial on the Ruby on Rails blog.

It was a brief introduction and the properly keen will have to do their homework to learn properly, but it’s good to hear developers explaining how they use it – and showing how quickly something can be built.

The evening was also a meeting of cultures; as journalists explained their various work brick walls and developers explained the differences between various coding languages and platforms.

Most useful for me was hearing about the projects developers are implementing in their respective organisations and the tools they are using.

Whether or not very much Ruby knowledge was gleaned by the hacks in one evening, I have great hopes for the conversation between programmers and journalists. It could result in some very innovative applications and stories that will help British journalists catch up with our US counterparts and break new ground.

If you would like to know more about interactives and data-driven journalism, check out the agenda for news:rewired – the nouveau niche (25-06-10) where these topics will be addressed. Buy your ticket (£80 + VAT) at this link. Speakers include OpenlyLocal’s Chris Taggart; the OnlineJournalismBlog’s Paul Bradshaw; and Ollie Williams from BBC Sport.

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Howard Kurtz: The media benefiting from non-profit investigations

Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz provides some more background on the New York Times / ProPublica Pulitzer win, as an example of a new way of funding serious journalism.

This is a glimpse of an unexpected future: a battered newspaper business, an idealistic start-up with a deep-pocketed liberal backer, and dogged reporters who otherwise might be out of work. If the Times was piggybacking on ProPublica – which covered about half the $400,000 cost of the investigation – the paper has plenty of company.

Full story at this link…

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Dan Nguyen: Coding for journalists – four online tutorials

Dan Nguyen, a developer/journalist for ProPublica, the  non-profit investigative news organisation, has shared four tutorials that would:

…guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites.

Four-part series at this link…

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ProPublica, SFGate.com and NYTimes among Pulitzer winners

The 2010 Pulitzer winners were announced yesterday, with winners and finalists from online journalism, as well as print backgrounds.

Reporter Sheri Fink from the US non-profit investigative organisation ProPublica has been awarded a Pulitzer prize for her work in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine:

…for a story that chronicles the urgent life-and-death decisions made by one hospital’s exhausted doctors when they were cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

Other online winners included Mark Fiore for his animated cartoons on SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle website:

…where his biting wit, extensive research and ability to distill complex issues set a high standard for an emerging form of commentary.

The online element of New York Times’ staff reporting was commended in the Pulitzer prize for national reporting:

Awarded to Matt Richtel and members of The New York Times Staff for incisive work, in print and online, on the hazardous use of cell phones, computers and other devices while operating cars and trucks, stimulating widespread efforts to curb distracted driving.

The New York Times has the full list of 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists, with comments from the board.

Or download the Pulitzer prize PDF at this link.

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ProPublica launches ‘matchmaker’ to pair case studies with local journalists

Non-profit US investigative organisation ProPublica has got so many ‘loan modification’ case studies it is now playing matchmaker, linking contacts and stories with local journalists from other publications and broadcasters as part of its reporter network project.

Numerous American homeowners have had problems obtaining ‘loan modifications’, a national programme with some major flaws.

More than three million people are eligible and more than one million might be currently involved in the loan modification process, ProPublica’s Mike Webb said, explaining the scale and level of interest.

“We’re doing this because more than 800 homeowners have shared their stories with us about the numerous problems they’ve had in obtaining a modification,” he said.

“We’ve shared many of their stories in our reports, but there are just too many to publish.  So we’re hoping local reporters can talk to the homeowners and local banks to help your readers understand how the program works (or doesn’t work).”

Very quickly, ProPublica had 40 reporters sign up to be be paired. “It’s a continuation of our sharing approach, like the reporting recipe, and stimulus data sets,” said Webb.

“We know that news organisations don’t give up their sources to their competitors, but we’re a different kind of publication,” say reporters Amanda Michel and Paul Kiel, on their blog.

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Investigative news organisation shares its reporting recipe

Taking the ‘show your process’ ethos seriously, the US-based non-profit investigative outlet ProPublica has released a recipe for one of its recent investigations, which examined how states oversaw the misconduct of medical professionals.

ProPublica was created two years ago to pursue stories that would spur change. As part of this mission, we make our finished work and its underlying data available to all. Other news organizations are free to republish stories posted on our site. Reporters across the country have used the data we have compiled on the stimulus to do local versions of these stories. And whenever possible, we post source documents for readers to view.

Now we are taking this principle a step further, giving away the recipe for what has been one of our most powerful reporting efforts to date. We are doing this because we believe there are many ways to prompt change through journalism.

Full post at this link…

Recipe at this link…

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