In 2014-15, ProPublica’s projects mixed deep reporting, rich multimedia, innovative social experiments, and interactive data.
Here are some highlights of our work in the past year:
FIRESTONE AND THE WARLORD was a vivid, riveting, recounting of a fascinating chapter of buried history: the secret deal struck between an iconic American business and the man who would become one of the 20th century’s most notorious war criminals. Its innovation was in presenting the long narrative in a way that made it easy for readers to follow.
Using 1964’s Freedom Summer as her backdrop, Nikole Hannah-Jones digs at family legend, tracks down survivors of violence and challenges quite a bit of conventional wisdom in THE GHOSTS OF GREENWOOD, set in the Mississippi town where her father was born. The result of her first journey there, at age 38, is part memoir, part history lesson, part reporting adventure.
News application developer Sisi Wei created INSIDE THE FIREWALL, which helps Western news organizations know if they’ve been blocked by China’s national censorship apparatus, and it also tries to answer why it happened.
Our investigation into the American Red Cross, THE RED CROSS’ SECRET DISASTER, found a charity that struggled to deliver basic aid after Sandy and an earlier storm, Hurricane Isaac, and that has refused to provide a detailed accounting of what it has done with donors’ money.
THE DEMOLITION OF WORKERS COMP was the first comprehensive look at the ways states have drastically and harmfully cut back on workers’ compensation over the past decade. Our coverage took on the complexities with urgency, and our presentation helped make the complexities easy to understand.
Southeast Louisiana is sinking fast. The Gulf of Mexico is inundating a football-field’s worth of soil every hour. LOSING GROUND uses rich satellite imagery, complex data journalism and multimedia narrative reporting to tell the story of how we came to this predicament, the quixotic effort to stem the course of the disaster, and the lives and cultures that will be lost if nothing is done.
