We chat with ProPublica’s Celeste LeCompte about combating the disinformation war, tackling the slow death of local media, and being champions of investigative and accountability journalism
(Excerpted from the Fjord Fika podcast)
ProPublica is a digital-only media company focused entirely on investigative journalism and digs deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust, and follows those stories as long as it takes to hold power to account — and they do it as a non-profit. It’s an interesting business model for a media company, but one that has been successful for ProPublica in its 10+-year history. The company and its staff of journalists have received four Pulitzer Prizes, three Peabody Awards, two Emmy Awards and a National Magazine Award, among others, for their work.
Celeste LeCompte isan award-winning journalist — primarily covering technology, innovation and environmental issues — and the vice president of business development at ProPublica, focused on revenue, partnerships and other strategic initiatives.
A selection of Skipper Warson’s conversation with Celeste is as follows. To listen to the full episode, click here. And be sure to stay tuned for more Fika spotlights on Design Voices.
Skipper Chong Warson: So the mission of ProPublica, is “to expose abuses of power and betrayals of public trust by government, business and other institutions, using an immoral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through a sustained spotlight of wrong doing.”
Celeste LeCompte: ProPublica is actually the first nonprofit that I’ve ever worked at, and as far as places with a strong mission goes, I think this is one of the best. The clarity of our mission makes it really easy for everybody here to know what they should be focused on and what they should be doing and that goes for me as well. So the primary focus at ProPublica is the idea that our work isn’t just work, for work’s sake. It’s here to spur reform. So we’re very much focused on the real world impact of doing investigative journalism. The way that we think that works is through the mechanism of this classic idea of shining a light on wrongdoing, on bad actors in the system and specifically this idea of sustained spotlighting. The way that ProPublica does its work is we produce journalism, we make sure people see it and we keep talking about the problem until something changes. All of our reporters here do big, in-depth, long-term projects and they will keep after that story, sometimes for years. Often writing updates as legislation is introduced, as policy debates occur, as CEOs get fired — whatever the case may be. They will stick with that story until we believe that the harm has made some kind of progress, in one form or the other.
Skipper Chong Warson: You’re very visible about the impact you’re all making — so much so, that it’s one of the main navigation points on your website.
Celeste LeCompte: That’s actually a change that we made this year when we relaunched the back end of our website, and that was a very intentional design change that we made because it’s so central to what we do and how we think about our work. We wanted to really clearly communicate that. We wanted people who were coming to ProPublica for the first time, seeing our stories, clicking through to the homepage and saying, “Who are those-people and what are they about?” To signal that this isn’t just info-tainment, this is not sensational, but this is about making change through journalism.
Skipper Chong Warson: So every year Fjord develops a set of predictions and trends. One of the 2018 Trends is around the ethics economy and how organizations have started to take political stances on issues of general concern and can’t afford to sit back and claim to be neutral. How do you feel about that sentiment at ProPublica?
Celeste LeCompte: For ProPublica, we’re a non-partisan organization, and that’s incredibly important to us and a thing we track. So we try to make sure that we’re consistently presenting the non-partisan identity that we strive to. So the way that we describe our ethical and political orientation is that we stand on the side of the truth. That is what we’re here to do: we’re here for the public interest, and truth is kind of our core value.
Skipper Chong Warson: If organisations are beginning to take political stances, then I feel it’s even more important for organizations like ProPublica to be on the side of truth because everyone is going to have their own version of truth.
Celeste LeCompte: Absolutely. I think that it becomes more of an interesting challenge for us to think about how we further improve the credibility of the work that we’re doing. So I’m going to keep going back to this idea of audience engagement being central to what we do. If you want people to actually believe that you’re on the right side of truth and not a mouthpiece for one side or the other, then they have to understand how you work, that you’re doing truly fair, thoroughly reported, open minded investigations. I believe that we’re doing that, so the more we let people inside, the more we can say, ‘This is how we work…’ I think that further enhances this credibility question, in people’s minds, about who we are and what we stand for.
Named for the Swedish custom that eschews the ‘on-the-go paper coffee cup’ routine in favor of slowing down and catching up with colleagues and friends, the Fjord Fika podcast features unscripted conversations with key luminaries and thought leaders in technology and design. Sometimes strange, but always interesting, each Fika conversation offers a fresh, honest look at all sides of innovation — the good, the bad and the ugly — and the impact on society. Fjord is a design and innovation consultancy, part of Accenture Interactive. To download Fika episodes and subscribe to the podcast, click here.
