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ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as the journalism community more broadly, while ensuring equal opportunities for all. Each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2025; here are our past reports.
Our Commitment
We believe that it is imperative to staff our newsroom and business operations with people from a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives. We are committed to removing barriers that have traditionally excluded qualified applicants, including people with disabilities, those from low-income backgrounds, veterans, people of color and women.
“For 10 years ProPublica has reported on its efforts to grow and diversify its staff. That important work continues,” ProPublica President Robin Sparkman said. “We are committed to covering a range of issues in our journalism. To do that effectively we need employees with varied perspectives and backgrounds.”
ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 186 full-time employees at the start of 2024 to 193 in 2025.
We’ve added resources to the staff supporting this work, including hiring a talent acquisition manager who has worked to refine our hiring process to make the candidate experience more fair and consistent. We’ve created organizational partnerships to provide access to investigative journalism training and build community with journalists from a variety of backgrounds. We’ve fostered mentorships so that any employee can benefit from a colleague’s experiences and we spearheaded the creation of a shared holiday calendar to promote greater awareness of diverse religious celebrations and avoid scheduling conflicts.
Our Diversity Committee comprises more than 50 ProPublicans who volunteer their time to work on initiatives that are pitched and run by the staff. The current co-chairs are Vianna Davila and Liz Sharp.
Our work in this area can also be seen in our journalism. Throughout 2024, we reported on the adverse effects of abortion restrictions on women, including those who died after their states banned the procedure. Our reporting resulted in new federal rules that went into effect last year that are aimed at speeding repatriations of Native American remains. Last February, the U.S. Department of Justice started working with a sheriff’s office in Wisconsin on a written policy on how to respond to incidents involving people with limited English proficiency; this followed our reporting on how a grammatical mistake in Spanish led sheriff’s deputies to wrongly blame a Nicaraguan dairy worker for his son’s death. Our reporting on systemic failings by the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat people with mental illnesses, including in cases in which veterans went on to kill themselves or others, resulted in commitments to increase staffing by the VA secretary.
We also partner with news organizations across the country. Last year, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill into law that curtailed the controversial contract-for-deed real estate deals and included greater protections for buyers; his action followed a 2022 investigation by ProPublica and the Sahan Journal that revealed questionable real estate transactions that left members of Minnesota’s Somali and Hispanic immigrant communities at risk of losing their homes. Meanwhile in Virginia, the state’s legislature last year approved a statewide commission to investigate the role of public colleges and universities in displacing Black communities, following our reporting on the issue with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.
Breakdown of Our Staff
As with last year, we collected aggregate data about our application and interview process. Out of 27 positions filled in 2024, 52% of the finalists identified as women and half identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. Fifty-six percent of the people we hired identified as women and 37% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white.
At the start of 2025, the percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 63%.
For the seventh year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. In editorial positions, women represented 52% of the staff.
About 2% of our staff identify as nonbinary or transgender.
Since 2022, we have collected demographic information about our board of directors. Of the 15 people on the board, 47% identified as women. About 67% of the directors identified as non-Hispanic white, compared to 64% last year.
As we’ve said since 2015, part of our commitment to diversity means being transparent about our own numbers. Here’s how our staff breaks down.
(Please note that the data is based on employees’ self-reported information. Recognizing that some people may identify as more than one race but not identify as a person of color, in 2022 we began stating numbers in terms of people who “solely identify as non-Hispanic white.” The employee information is as of Jan. 1 of each year. Managers are defined as staff members who supervise other people, and that group does not include all editors. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding. Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.)
Race and Ethnicity: All of ProPublica
Race and Ethnicity: Editorial
Race and Ethnicity: Managers
Gender: All of ProPublica
New Initiatives
Added new staff: Part of our goal in 2024 was to build capacity on the team that is responsible for hiring and supporting ProPublicans. We brought on a seasoned talent acquisition manager with over a decade of recruiting experience, including recent years at top news organizations. Their addition ensures our team has the capacity to fully support hiring managers while creating a thoughtful, well-structured recruiting experience for every candidate.
Strengthening fair and inclusive hiring: We’ve taken significant steps to make our hiring process even more fair, transparent and inclusive. By implementing structured interviews across the organization, we’re ensuring every candidate is evaluated consistently. We’ve also increased collaboration with hiring teams through more frequent consultations, ensuring we adhere to fair and nondiscriminatory hiring practices. On the candidate side, we’ve added more touchpoints and improved communication, so candidates are kept more up to date on the process of their applications.
Our Ongoing Efforts
ProPublica thinks about its efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism); recruiting talent and improving our hiring process; and inclusion and retention.
Building the Pipeline
Conference stipends: ProPublica partnered with Investigative Reporters & Editors to sponsor journalists to attend the annual IRE convention. We also sponsored a journalists of color mixer, open to everyone at the conference, which was attended by close to 100 people.
Emerging Reporters Program: The program provides financial assistance and mentorship to five students for whom investigative journalism might otherwise be inaccessible due to cost, so they can pursue early career opportunities in the field. The program is open to all and includes a $9,000 stipend, virtual programming and an all-expenses paid trip to an IRE conference on computer assisted reporting. This is the program’s ninth year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford.
Data Institute: In 2016, ProPublica journalists founded The Data Institute, a workshop for journalists on how to use data, design and code. ProPublica eventually started working with Open News, which coordinates student and instructor participation and provides support for project management and event planning. The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Journalism & Democracy now organize this in-person event. Last year a half dozen current and former ProPublicans served as trainers at the institute, which is focused on empowering people with data skills they can bring back to their own newsrooms.
Investigative Editor Training Program: ProPublica started an Investigative Editor Training Program in 2023 for journalists who want to learn how to manage, edit and elevate investigative projects that expose harm and create impact. The curriculum for the yearlong program was designed by ProPublica Managing Editor Ginger Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Alexandra Zayas. The program is open to all and tries to address the industry’s critical need to broaden the ranks of investigative editors. We selected 10 people to attend a weeklong training at our New York office. Also included in the program were an additional four ProPublica staffers who aspire to become story editors. Participants heard from ProPublica editors on different aspects of the craft, from story selection and memos to managing the reporting and digging into the first draft. They were also paired with ProPublica senior staff as mentors and received additional virtual training for the remainder of the year. We offered this training again in 2025.
Recruiting and Hiring
Affinity conferences: Last summer, ProPublica recruiters and newsroom staff attended the country’s three largest affinity journalism conferences, sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association. The newsroom sponsored the NABJ Investigative Task Force mixer and the Visual Task Force Moneta Sleet Photo Competition at the organization’s annual convention in Chicago.
Salary transparency and fairness: ProPublica is committed to paying its employees fairly and transparently and works to ensure that there is no improper discrimination in compensation. Since the fall of 2022, ProPublica has published salary ranges for all posted job openings, regardless of geography. Our staff recently formed a union, and future salary increases will be part of a collective bargaining agreement.
Interview pools: We strive for an interview pool that includes at least one qualified candidate from an underrepresented background. Interview pools are not capped and seek to include all equally qualified candidates.
Freelancer guide: ProPublica publishes a guide for freelancers interested in pitching an investigation to ProPublica. We designed the guide to formalize the pitch process and level the playing field for how freelance projects are presented and considered. Submissions will be reviewed by editors on a rotating basis. ProPublica will respond to anyone who completes the form, even if their proposal is not accepted.
LRN candidate outreach: Editors with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network continue to do personalized recruiting and offer office hours so local journalists can discuss their accountability work with a member of the team. LRN editors were also present at journalism conferences, including affinity group gatherings — where they met with interested applicants in an effort to help them with the project-development and application process. The program also regularly taps the talent team for leads of promising candidates. In addition, the team of editors regularly discusses the diversity of voices in the program and how to adapt our work to meet a range of needs.
Inclusion and Retention
Welcoming new hires and focusing on internal culture: Our inclusion subcommittee consists of about 30 ProPublicans who meet monthly to consider ways to make the newsroom more inclusive and fair, while building support for one another as colleagues. Mariam Elba and Megan O’Matz chair this subcommittee. The group created a tool to help staff identify training and development opportunities; fostered mentorships for new hires; and spearheaded the creation of a shared holiday calendar to promote greater awareness of various religious celebrations and avoid scheduling conflicts. An internal story club meets regularly to discuss particularly enjoyable stories, podcasts or books. The committee spearheaded the institution of voluntary breakout rooms after all-staff meetings, where staff are randomly assigned to groups who discuss a prompt created by the committee to spark conversation and build community. The committee works to improve communication, share knowledge and address challenges faced by a far-flung workforce.
Sensitivity subcommittee: Led by Colleen Barry, this group serves as a resource for editors and reporters to tap the collective brain trust of our newsroom when working on particularly sensitive stories about suicide, sexual abuse, child abuse, racial trauma and more. The committee maintains a Slack channel where anyone can share resources and where editors and reporters can solicit feedback on drafts or ask questions on how best to report on sensitive subjects. When a “sensitivity read” or the discussions during the editing and production of a story are particularly instructive, the subcommittee has shared those experiences at diversity committee meetings so any lessons can be more broadly applied.
What ProPublica Is Doing About Diversity in 2024
ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program, organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song, that is open to all and matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions. Last year, more than 50 ProPublicans participated in this program, which was started in 2018.
Unconscious bias training: Since 2021, ProPublica has used Paradigm Reach to provide ongoing training for staff to create a workplace culture that is intentional, inclusive and high performing. The training is provided to all new staff.
Diversity Committee office hours: We have continued to offer a casual virtual hangout twice a month where ProPublicans can chat with the Diversity Committee co-chairs to brainstorm or chat in a more intimate setting outside of the monthly committee meetings.
Interested in Working Here?
Here is our jobs page, where we post new positions, including fellowships, full-time and temporary roles.
