[3][4] In 2010, it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize; the story chronicled the urgent life-and-death decisions made by one hospital's exhausted doctors when they were cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina,[5][6][7] and was published both in The New York Times Magazine[8] and ProPublica's website.
[9] ProPublica was the brainchild of Herbert and Marion Sandler, the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, who have committed $10 million a year to the project.
[11]ProPublica had an initial news staff of 28 reporters and editors,[12] including Pulitzer Prize winners Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber, Jeff Gerth, and Marcus Stern.
[18] ProPublica, along with other major news outlets, received grant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
[24] In 2010, eight ProPublica employees made more than $160,000, including managing editor Stephen Engelberg ($343,463) and the highest-paid reporter, Dafna Linzer, formerly of the Washington Post ($205,445).
[33] Also in 2019, ProPublica reporter Hannah Dreier was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her series that followed immigrants on Long Island whose lives were shattered by a botched crackdown on MS-13.
[37][38] In May 2024, ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on the billionaires giving gifts to the US Supreme Court's justices and covering their travel expenses.
[39] In July 2024, Mary Hudetz was presented with the Richard LaCourse Award for Investigative Journalism by the Indigenous Journalists Association for her work on ProPublica’s "The Repatriation Project.
"[40] Her reporting, which focused on the complexities and obstacles in repatriating Native American remains and sacred objects from museums and universities "had rippling effects at the institutional level down to Indigenous communities and peoples".
[41] T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project collaborated on this piece about the process that discovered a serial rapist in Colorado and Washington state.
[48] ProPublica conducted a large-scale, circumscribed investigation on Psychiatric Solutions, a company based in Tennessee that buys failing hospitals, cuts staff, and accumulates profit.
[53] In 2015, ProPublica launched Surgeon Scorecard, an interactive database that allows users to view complication rates for eight common elective procedures.
[55][56] However, statisticians, including Andrew Gelman, stood behind their decision to attempt to shine light on an opaque aspect of the medical field,[57] and ProPublica offered specific rebuttals to RAND's claims.
[63] ProPublica would later reveal that technology investor and political donor Peter Thiel legally earned more than $5 billion in a tax-free Roth IRA account through his investments in private companies.
[65] Research by ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio found juvenile incarcerations in Rutherford County, Tennessee, to be far higher than the national average.
[68] In 2021, ProPublica published the results of a two-year analytical project involving examining billions of rows of EPA data to create a map to chart industrial pollution at the neighborhood level – the first of its kind.
"[72] In 2017, ProPublica published an investigative report detailing the involvement of Gina Haspel in enhanced interrogation techniques at a black site in Thailand.
The series exposed institutional resistance from museums and universities, driving significant policy discussions[75] and increased efforts toward compliance.