Our mission is to end abuses of power'

ProPublica's Richard Tofel: 'Our mission is to end abuses of power'

The president of the non-profit investigative journalism website on measuring impact, team work – and Edward Snowden

Ed Pilkington

Richard Tofel has had a dream. It came upon him the night before we meet and he is still a little rattled by it. In it, he found himself performing his old role at Dow Jones, where he rose to become assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal. "I was back in Dow Jones, and there were a million committees and a thousand departments and forms to fill," he says. After a beat, he adds: "It was not a happy dream."

The good news for Tofel is that for more than five years he has worked at the gloriously lithe and bureaucratically unencumbered ProPublica, a non-profitinvestigative journalism outfit where he is president. "There are advantages to having 10,000 people, but the saying about turning round the battleship is true. The media business is changing so quickly, there are enormous advantages to those who can change quickly with it."

On Monday night, Tofel takes that message of small and flexible is beautiful to London, where he will be addressing the One World Media awards honouring outstanding coverage of the developing world. He will talk about the subject that is increasingly preoccupying him: how to measure impact in journalism. The issue, you might say, is as old as the printing presses. Grub Street has traditionally done it, scurrilously, by counting "scalps" – resignations exacted of people in high office. Newspapers have also tracked circulation or advertising revenue, though both those indicators have been disrupted by the digital revolution. The modern digital equivalent – internet traffic – is a powerful though crude tool for measuring journalistic success.

In Tofel's new world of philanthropic journalism – ProPublica receives about $12m a year from 3,000 donors – the demand for more sophisticated methods is becoming increasingly loud, in tune with a trend sweeping the whole philanthropic sector. It is no coincidence that Tofel's work on impact, includinga white he wrote last year paper as well as his trip to London to address One World Media, has been sponsored by Bill Gates – a philanthrocapitalist whose desire to quantify the outputs of projects he backs is legendary. "The issue of measurement in journalism is becoming more prevalent," Tofel says. "More donors care about it in the first place, and many more are impressed that we do it. It's one of the things that makes ProPublica attractive to donors – that we take this seriously."

In the first five years of the New York-based operation's active existence (it was launched in 2007 but started producing the following year) there are obvious indicators of success. It has won two Pulitzers, including the first such accolade awarded to an online news organisation in 2010; its staff has grown to 40 journalists; income has expanded by 20% and traffic now stands at 561,000 unique visitors a month – diminutive by the WSJ's standards but a solid base on which to build.

But for Tofel those analytics remain unsatisfactory. They are too fuzzy to show whether ProPublica has achieved its mission. "Our mission was very clear from the outset: change or reform is the critical question. Ending abuses of power, advancing the public interest," he says. As an example he points to last year's partnership with the Guardian and the New York Times over the Edward Snowden documents on the National Security Agency. Working collaboratively, and with the benefit of the expertise of ProPublica's technically-gifted data editor, Jeff Larson, the three news organisations revealed that the agency had cracked much of the encryption that protects global digital communications.

"That story has led to a great deal of activity," Tofel says. "There has been substantial change in the private sector in terms of encryption, and the government itself is still working through its response." The final test of whether the encryption story had "impact" according to ProPublica's mission would be if "legitimate encryption is more secure than it was before, and governments have rebalanced their approaches to encryption". In Tofel-land, the debate that Snowden's leaks has inspired is great, but in itself not enough. "There needs to be results. From our perspective, congressional press releases and even hearings are steps in the right direction but are not dispositive."

ProPublica has had 104 interactions with other news organisations since launch, and in 2013 alone it had 26 partners including BuzzFeed, NPR, Time and This American Life. Of those many partners, Tofel has a personal bond with this paper that is expressed visually in the framed Guardian front page on his office wall from 13 July 2011, which carries a story under his byline. It was at the height of the phone hacking scandal, and Tofel used his contacts within the Bancroft family that formerly owned Dow Jones to reveal that several key family members felt they would not have sold to Rupert Murdoch in 2007 had they known about the phone-hacking scandal at the time. "That's my only story as a reporter since college," Tofel says with evident delight.

If partnerships are central to ProPublica's journalistic mission, then philanthropy remains central to its financial viability. Tofel says he'd "love someone to announce advertising rates would soar, or readers would be eager to pay for content, but I don't expect either".

The organisation has worked hard to ween itself off dependency on its launch donors, West Coast billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler, reducing their contribution from 80-90% of income to less than a third today (Herbert remains founding chairman of the board). But a small number of wealthy individuals and foundations still provide the lion's share of revenue. Tofel says he wants to see that funding base diversify and widen, but his main goal is to show that philanthropy is applicable to other strands of journalism. "What we are doing here is leading the way in building a new class of cultural institution in this country. Almost all leading arts institutions, museums, private universities and hospitals are dependent on philanthropy – we are trying to show that some kinds of journalism in the US need to be funded the same way."

Have there been moments of conflict between the interests of donors and the journalistic independence of the newsroom, I ask. "Very minimal. A few times," he replies. Pressed for details, he won't give names, but he will say this: "We've had one or two donors who didn't like the thrust of our coverage. We said, 'Gee, that's a shame,' and they left." Despite these occasional tensions, which he likens to the clashes that traditional news organisations periodically have with advertisers, he thinks the benefits of philanthropic support vastly outweigh the disadvantages.

Five years on, the crisis in US investigative journalism which inspired ProPublica's creation is even more profound, he suggests. "The decline in resources for investigative journalism continues. There is only one newspaper – the New York Times – that has not reduced its commitment, even over the period we've been in business. The broadcast networks have almost completely given up." The work of startups such as ProPublica itself, BuzzFeed which has created a new investigative unit, or the new venture funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar helps to fill the gap, but only to a degree. "There have been a proliferation of non-profits around the country but they are not in the aggregate nearly enough to make up what has been lost."

As for the future, Tofel will not predict how ProPublica will look in five years' time – "my crystal ball isn't that sharp". Over the next two years the plan is to add a further five staff, including more reporters and a design editor to focus on video and new richer forms of story-telling. Given last night's dream, I ask him whether he ever has twinges of desire to be back in the thick of the storm at Dow Jones, rather than innovating on the margins. "Really not, really not. What I do have twinges about, more than occasionally, is that I wish we had a large guaranteed audience for anything we publish. We have to work for our audience, every time. But we have a larger audience than we had five years ago, and we are getting there."

Curriculum vitae

Age 56

Education Harvard University (law, public policy)

Career 1983 legal associate, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler 1989 assistant general counsel, Dow Jones 1992 assistant managing editor, Wall Street Journal 1995 director of international administration and development, Dow Jones 1997 vice president of corporate communications 2002 assistant publisher, WSJ 2004 president and chief operating officer, International Freedom Center 2007 general manager, ProPublica 2013 president

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/26/propublica-richard-tofel-investigative-journalism