ProPublica

The Breakthrough: How Reporters Really Use Unnamed Sources

The most influential reporting on the Trump administration has relied on unnamed sources. Here’s the story behind them.

The Breakthrough: Uncovering the FBI’s Secret Rules

Watchlists, informants and social media investigations. What exactly are FBI agents allowed to do?

The Breakthrough: Reporters Examine Murder Where Cops Struggle to Curb It

How a team of New York Times reporters chronicled every homicide in a Bronx precinct and what they learned about policing.

The Breakthrough: What American Journalists Can Learn From Reporting Under Putin

Russian journalist and editor Elizaveta Osetinskaya published hard-hitting stories about the Kremlin. And it cost her her job.

The Breakthrough: Uncovering Danger at the Pharmacy Counter

Reporters at the Chicago Tribune set out to learn whether pharmacies in Chicago have been warning patients who’ve been prescribed risky combinations of drugs.

The Breakthrough: How a Reporter Solved a Decades-Old Murder

The 1962 murder of Mary Horton was one of the oldest cold cases in U.S. history. Then reporter Jerry Mitchell started digging into it.

The Breakthrough: Meet the Reporter Who Went Undercover in the Hermit Kingdom

Author Suki Kim taught English at a boarding school for North Korea’s young elites. Here’s how she pulled it off.

Introducing Our New Podcast: The Breakthrough

We’re relaunching our podcast with a new format and new name, starting with three very special episodes.

The Breakthrough: The $2 Drug Test

We’re relaunching our podcast with a new format and new name, starting with three special episodes. This week: how ProPublica reporters discovered police departments nationwide use a $2 test for detecting drugs that can send innocent people to jail.

Renewable Energy: An Exxon Investigation Given Second Life as Trump Taps Exec for Cabinet

Podcast: Reporting by Inside Climate News will be required reading for lawmakers considering Exxon boss Rex Tillerson’s fitness to be the country’s next Secretary of State.

How We Found a Pro-Trump Group Blew Past Campaign Finance Laws

We talked with ProPublica reporter Robert Faturechi about America Comes First, which appears to have violated legal deadlines and caps on contributions.

What You Need to Know About Authoritarianism

Podcast: We spoke with Amanda Taub, who delved deep into the research on what prompts people to support authoritarian leaders.

How Journalists Need to Go Beyond Fact Checking Trump

Podcast: We spoke with political science professor Brendan Nyhan about President-Elect Trump's lies and how reporters should handle them.

How Journalists Need to Begin Imagining the Unimaginable

In this week’s podcast, journalist Masha Gessen, who spent years reporting from Putin’s Russia, shares her thoughts on what journalists should be on watch for with the incoming U.S. administration.

The Presidential Polls Weren’t As Wrong as the Interpreters

Podcast: A senior writer for the FiveThirtyEight website argues the polls picked up evidence the race would be close -- but many people just didn’t believe it.

After Electionland: How it Worked, What We Found and What’s Next

Podcast: Electionland, an unprecedented effort to cover ballot access issues in real time, launched on November 8th. Today we talk with a few of the key players from ProPublica about what it was like reporting from one of the largest...

Inside ‘Electionland’: Tracking Voting Problems in Real Time

Podcast: ProPublica and Univision reporters share which barriers to the ballot they’re seeing during this election.

Polling, Explained

Podcast: FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten talks about how to tell good polls from bad ones, and how journalists and politicians can talk about them more effectively.

Should Media Employees Give to Campaigns?

Podcast: Journalist Dave Levinthal analyzed how many journalists, reporters and editors gave to a 2016 presidential campaign. Of the small percentage that did, most gave to Hillary Clinton.

Codes of Silence and Journalism’s Obligations

Podcast: A reporter in Chicago took on the police department’s alleged code of silence on misconduct. He produced a memorable story and poses some provocative questions to go with it.

How Trump Allegedly Ensured His Golf-Course Employees Were ‘Pretty Enough’

Podcast: How a Los Angeles Times reporter documented complaints of sexism from Donald Trump’s golf-course employees.

How the Nation’s Opioid Epidemic Is Morphing — and Growing

Podcast: Journalist David Armstrong has been tracking the rise of heroin and fentanyl and the human toll, as well as how drug companies marketed their narcotics years ago.

Uncovering Texas’ Strategy to Slash Much-Needed Special Education Services

Podcast: The Houston Chronicle found that Texas quietly pushed school districts to pare the number of students receiving special education services. The move saved billions of dollars but deprived tens of thousands of students of needed help.

The Hidden Toll of Drug-Resistant Superbugs

Podcast: Tens of thousands of Americans die every year because of infections they pick up in hospitals, but the medical community is barely keeping track.

Fact-checking Donald Trump’s Charity Claims

Podcast: Donald Trump says he has personally donated millions to charity in recent years. Rather than debunking his claims, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold set out to prove them true – and still hasn’t been able to.

Inside an International Court of Money and Mystery

Podcast: BuzzFeed’s Chris Hamby tells us how he dug into the murky world of global dispute resolution court.

Hacking the American College Application Process

Podcast: How a team of reporters uncovered a culture of cheating among East Asian college prep companies

Uncovering a $1 Billion Deal to Detain Unauthorized Immigrants

Podcast: Chico Harlan discusses his investigation into private immigrant detention centers.

When USA Gymnastics Turned a Blind Eye to Sexual Abuse

Heresy: A Reporter Investigates Evidence That Jesus Had a Wife

Podcast: How journalist Ariel Sabar tied a former pornographer to an alleged forgery scheme that rocked the highest echelons of biblical scholarship.

An Overdue Examination of Detroit’s Forgotten Rape Kits

Podcast: Anna Clark speaks about her investigation for Elle Magazine into Detroit’s backlog of rape kits.

Doctors in Danger: How the Assad Regime is Targeting Syrian Physicians

Podcast: Ben Taub of the New Yorker describes the shadow network of doctors that has emerged out of the Syrian conflict.

Rough Passage: Reporters Find Abuse, Neglect and Death Aboard Private Prison Vans

Podcast: Eli Hager and Alysia Santo of the Marshall Project discuss their many months investigating the prison van industry.

How New Jersey Has Embraced ‘State-Sanctioned Loan-Sharking’ to Students

Podcast: ProPublica’s Annie Waldman talks about what makes New Jersey’s student loans so onerous.

From Captive to Captor: A Journalist’s Journey from Prisoner to Prison Guard

Podcast: Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer goes undercover as a prison guard in Louisiana and finds a dark truth within himself.

Why Liberal New York City’s Schools Are Among the Nation’s Most Segregated

Podcast: Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times Magazine talks about her piece on sending her young daughter to a segregated school.

How a Shootout on a Guatemalan Highway Opened Window to Corruption

Podcast: Our own Sebastian Rotella tells us about the challenges of reporting on corruption in violent and chaotic Guatemala.

Why Are Hate Crime Statistics So Poorly Tracked?

Podcast: Associated Press reporter Christina Cassidy tells us how she investigated the underreporting of hate crime statistics and what that means for victims.

Horror House on the Prairie: Hard Labor and Harsh Treatment for Group of Disabled Men in Iowa

Podcast: New York Times reporter Dan Barry tells us how he reconstructed a tale of exploitation and tragedy in his new book, ‘The Boys in the Bunkhouse’

How We Decided to Test Racial Bias in Algorithms

Podcast: Our reporters talk about how they uncovered racial bias in software used to predict future criminals.

How the NY/NJ Port Authority Misspent Millions in Federal Money Meant to Cut Air Pollution

Podcast: Six years ago, the two-state agency pledged to reduce emissions from trucks and accepted $35 million in federal dollars to do it. Today, it has little to show for the money it spent. Writer Max Rivlin-Nadler takes ProPublica’s Joaquin...

Uncovering the Stark Disparities Behind School Money

Podcast: NPR reporter Cory Turner details his investigation into school spending inequities.

How Milwaukee Landlords Figured Out How to Collect Rent and Not Pay Taxes

Podcast: Cary Spivak and Kevin Crowe of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel take ProPublica’s David Epstein inside their investigation of how landlords are gaming the system.

How Residents Get Ensnared by NYPD Nuisance Abatement Cases

Podcast: How New York Daily News reporter Sarah Ryley discovered that the NYPD was targeting minority neighborhoods in their enforcement of a law that can boot people from their homes and businesses

Uncovering the Fiction of ‘Farm to Table’ Food

Podcast: How a Tampa Bay Times food critic revealed that many 'locally sourced' restaurants were anything but.

Captive Labor and the Reporters Who Exposed an International Scandal

Podcast: Behind the scenes with the Associated Press reporters who found slavery on the high seas.

Meet the Panama Papers Editor Who Handled 376 Reporters in 80 Countries

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Marina Walker Guevara joined our podcast, talking about how they handled such a big leak and why some big U.S. outlets passed.

Keeping Tabs on the Hacking Hero Who Became a Criminal Kingpin

Podcast: Evan Ratliff of The Atavist Magazine tells ProPublica reporter David Epstein about reporting (in real time) his weekly series on Paul Le Roux, a programmer turned cartel leader.

How One Reporter Got the Police Shooting Video Everyone Wanted

Podcast: Independent journalist Brandon Smith tells ProPublica senior reporter Julia Angwin how his lawsuit made the Laquan McDonald video public.

Vietnam Vets’ Fight for Benefits Gets New Crowdsourcing Boost

Podcast: ProPublica and Virginian-Pilot reporters share what they’ve learned investigating the impacts of Agent Orange and detail the digital tools they’re using in the effort.