Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The Center for Public Integrity, one of America’s oldest and most storied nonprofit investigative news operations, has a new CEO.
That’s a sentence, for better or worse, I could have written quite a few times in recent years. CPI was founded in 1989 by legendary investigative journalist Chuck Lewis, who ran the place for its first 15 years. But since then, it’s gotten new leaders in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2014, 2016, 2019, and now 2021, and not all of those departures were happy ones.
(Even that relative stretch of stability from 2007 to 2014 featured what I’d consider a finalist for Worst Idea in 21st-Century American Journalism: converting a deep-diving investigative newsroom that published a few times a month into a win-the-morning machine that would publish “10 to 12 original investigative pieces” a day (!), all of it to be monetized with ads (!!) and a $50-a-year membership for an ad-free site (!!!). Oh, and giving it the cringeworthy name “iWatch News.” Internal projections said they’d get 50,000 paying members within a year and be pulling in $16 million in annual advertising within five — all of which would more than pay for a planned $80,000 TV studio. And who should run this “Center 2.0”? How about John Solomon — a guy known at the time for putting The Washington Times “into a near-death spiral” and writing the sort of misleading stories that your employer’s ombudsman call “‘gotcha’ without the gotcha”? Not to mention a guy who’s since been known for turning Circa into a right-wing farm team for Fox News, prompting a staff revolt and management review at The Hill over sketchy pro-Trump exclusives, being labeled a “disinformation” vector by Fox News researchers, and becoming a main driver of pro-Trump, anti-Ukraine “smears” and “architect of Trump’s Ukraine conspiracies.” Yeah, that guy. iWatch News died a quick death.)
Ahem. Where were we? Anyway, despite still producing lots of great journalism (including two Pulitzer winners since 2014, not to mention a gazillion other award-winners), there has long been a sense that CPI wasn’t quite reaching its potential. To put it in numbers: In 2004, CPI had a full-time staff of 40. In 2009, ProPublica launched with a staff of 36.
Today, ProPublica’s staff page lists 174 people. CPI’s has 26.
Under its previous CEO, Susan Smith Richardson (now at The Guardian), CPI recentered its journalism on a single topic (though one that touches a thousand others): inequality. You can see the change in how the center describes itself. Before: “The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom investigating democracy, power and privilege.” Now: “The Center for Public Integrity inspires change using investigative reporting that reveals the causes and effects of inequality. “
The new CEO is Paul Cheung, best known for his role the past three years as director of journalism and technology innovation at the Knight Foundation, the largest philanthropic player in the field. Before that, Cheung worked in various journalism management roles at NBC News, AP, the Miami Herald, and The Wall Street Journal; he also spent four years as president of the Asian American Journalists Association.
I hopped on Zoom last week to chat with Chueng and current CPI editor-in-chief Matt DeRienzo, who joined the center a little over a year ago and has been part of that shift to inequality. Cheung was just finishing up his final days at Knight (today’s his first day in the new job); our conversation has been edited for length, clarity, and the false impression that none of us say “um” or “like.”
So when we think about the audience approach, I’m not thinking it would be for everybody and anybody, but it will really be focused on the folks who are most impacted when health inequities surface. We need to think about who that sort of core audience is, and then from there think about the extended audience.
But public service broadcasters are generally pretty attuned to the idea that they need to reach everybody. Like, the BBC has very much a mission that it is supposed to be universal, that it should try to represent and to reach the entire British community. And Rodney’s complaint was that a lot of nonprofit outlets in the states have been more satisfied reaching an audience that’s mostly highly educated and upper-middle-class — elites, by whatever definition of that term. It’s a tough problem for nonprofit outlets, I think, to reach outside the Beltway and New York, people who have no Acela stop anywhere nearby.
So one thing is just focus, and getting deeper impact through that focus. And then it’s just a recognition that inequity is fundamental to the story of America, and that we’re at a historic moment. So much stuff has happened to widen the wealth gap in the past couple of years, and then a pandemic on top of that. It’s actually a very broad lane because it touches across so many aspects of society.
The shift in terms of this group of investigative reporters? One is that investigative journalists are used to catching the bad guy who breaks the rules. Right? And what we’re focused on when we’re talking about inequity is the rules that are working just exactly as they were were meant to.
Some of them were designed to be discriminatory, and some of them weren’t — they were designed to be neutral, but “neutral” turns out to be discriminatory because of everything that happened in the past. There’s a good recent example of this: the PPP program. It was set up to be based on businesses’ existing relationships with bankers. And so if you didn’t have an existing relationship with a banker, or you were in a red-lined community, you were screwed. And that’s how you end up with the outcomes that we see.
The other change for us is — we’ve always done deeply data-driven work, we’ve always done great narrative reporting. You know, won a Pulitzer for Breathless and Burdened, which told the stories of coal miners. We’ve done those two things really well over the years.
The two elements that we are really emphasizing adding to our work are solutions and historical context. You can’t tell the story of inequality without historical context — as all the 1619 Project backlash and Critical Race Theory stuff going on right now highlights.
We were talking this morning on Slack — our reporting might be banned in some states now from being used in classrooms!
So Paul — let’s say it’s a couple years from now. You’ve just celebrated your second anniversary as CEO. What are the things that I should be looking for then that would tell me you’ve done a good job, that you’ve done the things that you wanted to do? What do you want to have accomplished by then?
And for us to be, you know, truly independent — in the sense that, let’s say we piss off a funder or a donor, that the place will still be able to do the journalism and thrive. And I think to me that’s the ultimate success for an independent nonprofit. That’s the path, editorial and financial independence, because unless we have that, then we’re forever beholden to some other factors.
[To defend myself a bit: CPI doesn’t really promote it as a membership program; the copy on the homepage hides it under standard “Donate” and “Support Us” buttons, rather than something like “Join Us” or “Become a Member.”]
Memberships have certainly been the big move for news nonprofits recently to add an independent revenue source. How do you guys think about that, how’s it been going, and what are your plans going forward?
I want to make a distinction between what is the member and what is the donor. I think sometimes, in nonprofit journalism, we really conflate the two. Member, donor, and subscriber sometimes blur. So I really want to make that delineation. This is not a subscription service. Membership entails a relationship beyond just contact. I think that’s what our focus is looking at, based on our strengths and weaknesses: What is it that we could provide for, you know, the most rudimentary member all the way up to a higher level member? And as we look at that engagement, we’re probably going to think about new types of products and services.
Of the things that you guys have published in the past year, Matt, what are some of the projects or stories that you’re most proud of? Or that had the biggest impact?
So I think one of the roles we can have is to help enable local news organizations to understand and write about these issues of inequality. We can build national data sets. So one of the things I’m proud of is we spent a year making 1,200 records requests — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of data analysis — building a national database on polling place closures since the Shelby decision. That fueled our own reporting in a project called Barriers to the Ballot Box last year, and it turned out to be quite a year for voter disenfranchisement conversations.
But the other thing is that enabled others’ reporting, you know, from NPR, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, to local news organizations like Wisconsin Watch and Georgia Public Radio. That dataset will probably be used in a future Supreme Court argument, I expect, because it just didn’t exist before — because it was hard to put together. So that’s the kind of thing that I’m really proud of, when it has impact that goes far beyond us.
But if you don’t have the business and technical infrastructure to support the journalism, then it’s just not going to thrive. So I think that’s the work that I will be focusing on: How do I make sure that the journalism has proper distribution channels? What is the right sort of business strategy and monetization strategy behind that?
And I also want to point out that point of differentiation. And what really attracted me to CPI from the get-go is that we’re not just dedicating a team to cover race and equity. What really attracted me is the whole organization, the board, made a conscious decision to say we’re going to do this, and we’re gonna dedicate the entire organization to it. And I just cannot imagine anyone else making that step.
Right now, you see a lot of mainstream outlets say, like, “we’re going to hire a team of four,” “we’re going to hire a team of five,” right? A team of five is not going to take down inequity. Neither will a team of 30, you know, but I think that because our whole mission is now on it, I feel like even when no one else cares about it anymore, we’ll still be here. We’ll be that annoying voice, reminding people that this still exists and this is important. That’s the flag we’re planting in the sand.
And then when I think about some of the for-profit stuff, when I think about The Juggernaut, which is a site focused on South Asia. They got a lot of VC funding, and they are really leaning into sort of the intersection of being South Asian and entertainment as a way to really look at how do we create content for all these different intersectionalities. I think of that when I think about, for CPI, that yes, we are covering inequity, but there’s also a lot of intersectionality and nuance there, and how do we lean into that as a vehicle to get us to be financially independent?
I think some of the work that CalMatters and the 19th are doing is also super interesting. The way they think about partnership, the way they think about events, the way they’re expanding is something that I’m taking note of in terms of the nonprofit sector.
But I also really don’t want to get too hung up on nonprofit or for-profit. In some ways it’s just a tax status — there are only so many ways you can make money. So I’m also like looking beyond the nonprofit sector and thinking about how some of the more successful journalism outfits — like Axios, right, and how they were able to quickly not just establish themselves but also acquire all these different local assets? What does that strategy look like, in terms of newsletters? And so I think I’ll be taking a multi-disciplinary approach to figuring out what might work for CPI.
I don’t pretend to know the deep internals of the organization, but is there a reason that you think CPI has had those — I don’t want to say struggles with direction, but maybe why it hasn’t had a more direct path forward? I mean, I think back to the whole John Solomon thing, which seemed like a terrible idea at the time. Is there something about CPI that might be behind that last decade or so — and how do you want to change it?
If you think about the growth of nonprofit journalism, it really went from like this tiny, tiny piece of journalism into this bigger, much bigger piece over the last decade. And CPI, being one of the original investigative nonprofits, others are coming in, and I just think CPI was just trying to keep up with the times. And that’s much like strategy changing, right?
If you go back to some of the other early nonprofits, you also see that sort of revolving door of changes in strategy, right — except that those nonprofits were able to ride through because the founder was making the changes, right? Similarly, if we move that timeline back, the founder of CPI was around for how long, more than a decade? So I feel like there was that long stability. And for me, if I look at my own track record, I’m usually at a place for like a minimum of six to seven years. I mean, inequity is not something that we will be able to say, like, “Okay, we’re done” after, like, two years — where we can just say, “We dismantled inequity, we’re good to go.”
So I can’t speak to the past about CPI. But I think what we’re doing now, in terms of getting really close to the people who are affected by what we’re covering, is the way to be adaptive in the future. And we won’t have to go through major changes of approach because we weren’t close to what was happening.
So I would say, moving ahead, that we want to be imaginative about what journalism, especially investigative journalism, can be. And so we’ve got to go back to some of the original ethos, to why CPI was founded. So there might be things that we’ll be trying that you might say, “Hey, this is not your typical 5,000-word investigative project.” I would say be on the lookout for some of those. Maybe some Easter eggs or surprises. It might work, it might not work, but I would say we’re ready to play.
