While you are undoubtedly enjoying extraordinary digital journalism, you will not encounter a body of work quite like ProPublica’s. We only take on stories we think could spark real-world change, and only those we don’t think would get done without us.
Other publications have explored the harms of abortion bans, but none exposed their most devastating consequence: the preventable deaths of women — those who wanted their pregnancies and didn’t. ProPublica reported five in 2024, an effort that involved cultivating sensitive sources, obtaining confidential reports, tussling with government officials to secure public data, working with shellshocked families to gather reams of hospital records and analyze them in consultation with dozens of medical experts. ProPublica was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for this work.
But we didn’t stop there. As the Trump administration cut funding for maternal health research, we expanded our investigation from the anecdotal to the statistical. Among our new findings: After Texas banned abortion, sepsis rates spiked for women hospitalized for second-trimester miscarriages.
Our DNA as an online investigative newsroom underlies all we do. Reporters dig up findings and then literally everyone else — from digital designers to social media producers to the editor-in-chief — has a singular mission: To amplify those findings.
The result of this shared purpose is a piece like Why I Left The Network, which captures in an unprecedented scale why it’s so hard to find an affordable therapist, as told by the therapists themselves; the rich engagement reporting and thoughtful visual approach conjure the intimacy of a session in this piece, which led a package that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory reporting.
Our reporting has allowed us to take our readers into the most secluded quarters of those now in power, giving them access to private speeches unveiling how Russell Vought planned to put federal workers “in trauma” and letting them witness what happens aboard ICE Air.
Our expertise in source protection has earned us thousands of secure tips that have fueled our reporting on the second Trump administration; our industry-leading engagement journalists won the applause of our peers for a creative crowdsourcing effort that involved a billboard on wheels.
We share everything we learn as widely as we can, in as many formats as we can. We host events and publish reporting recipes for anyone considering expanding on our investigations. And as the federal government removes records from the internet, we continue to strengthen the ways our online databases can be useful to the public.
We use social media to bring our investigations to different audiences. We also use it to build trust with readers by letting them hear straight from our reporters about how they do their work, and by letting them hear straight from our sources. Our audiences love when we use it to show the receipts of our reporting.
