ProPublica Reviews

-Dysfunctional management structure created a weird and unhealthy office culture. The newsroom seemed to have grown very quickly and there wasn't a great plan about what to do with its resources. -I often felt unclear about exactly what my job was, but I felt like asking too many questions about such things was discouraged (ironically enough, given PP's mission). Some managers seemed more concerned about how they appeared to their superiors than they did about leading their teams or producing the best work possible. In general, CYA was the order of the day. -Too much emphasis on big bombshell investigations could lead to perverse incentives. When your newsroom's driving mission is "accountability," every story needs to be framed in terms of a finger-pointing, who-did-what-wrong narrative. I worked on many stories where that was the right frame ... and others where it was a real stretch. But when reporters and editors work for months on a single investigation, there's a lot of internal pressure to produce flashy results, even if it turns out there's not much there there. This isn't unique to PP, but I think it's especially pronounced there because the long time horizon for projects makes reporters and editors feel desperate to score.

The only con for me is the pressure of living up to this kind of opportunity, and the patience to stick with a project for the amount of time required to make it truly stand out.