ABSTRACT
The Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, and Mother Jones are the largest nonprofit investigative news organizations in the United States. They are prolific producers of investigative journalism and appear to have achieved financial stability. The Center for Investigative Reporting was created in 1977, three years after the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate revelations. It was a period noted for the quantity of investigative reporting and adversarial relations between reporters and government. The center’s early stories were published in liberal magazines that were more receptive to outside contributors than newspapers, which mainly did their own reporting. Magazine editors were like-minded and interested in pursuing complex investigative stories and they paid for contribution. The MacArthur Foundation in 1993 donated $500,000 to the center in a capacity-building general grant – one of the first big contributions it received that was not tied to a specific story or project.
