ProPublica to expand its work in audience engagement, involve people in newsgathering with $2.2 million from Knight Foundation

ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism nonprofit, will build on its innovative approach to engaging the public in newsgathering, and introduce new training programs for journalists with $2.2 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The funding will also provide ongoing support to ProPublica’s award-winning news applications team, led by Assistant Managing Editor Scott Klein, to deliver engaging data journalism, develop open-source tools and create opportunities for news organizations to use data sets to strengthen journalism in their local communities.

With this new investment in audience engagement efforts, ProPublica will revamp its Get Involved platform, which allows people to participate in reporting through discussions, feedback, story suggestions and more. The team will work to integrate the platform more seamlessly with its stories, information crowdsourcing efforts, and social media and news applications. Led by Senior Engagement Editor Amanda Zamora, the engagement team will conduct more experiments on the latest social platforms and messaging apps to better connect with both readers and other journalists. They will also build open-source tools and share best practices for using interactive features or news applications to inform and involve users in reported issues and inspire offline action.