What Went Wrong at the Center for Public Integrity?

Reflections after talking with former leaders

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

When Paul Steiger and I first talked, in the late Spring of 2007, about what would become ProPublica, he recommended that I look closely at a recent paper just out from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. It was written by Chuck Lewis, the founder of the pioneering Center for Public Integrity (CPI), and was entitled, “The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism.”  While Paul had some important new twists in mind, Chuck Lewis’s paper was a touchstone for us, and his CPI had pointed the way down the path we sought to walk.

So it was with special sadness that I heard the news late last month about what seems likely to be the end, one way or another, of CPI.

There will be time and space for others to deconstruct precisely what went wrong at the end for CPI, leading to the departures of both its CEO and editor-in-chief even before the news broke. This week, I want to take a broader look at an institution that pioneered one of the great changes sweeping journalism, and continued to occasionally publish excellent work (winning a Pulitzer a decade ago), but couldn’t seem organizationally to keep up, not just in the last few years, but over much of the two decades since Lewis gave up its leadership in 2004.

What I heard from former leaders

Toward that end, I have spent time in recent weeks talking to eight former top leaders of CPI, including from both the editorial and business sides, about their perceptions of what happened and why. Some of them departed the organization entirely voluntarily; others did not. Our ground rules, to encourage candor, were that I could quote people, but not by name.

Three things were most striking, and wove, unsolicited, through my conversations. The first two were the very considerable turnover at the top of the organization, and, relatedly I think, the long-term, cultural shortcomings of its Board of Directors.

By my count, over the last 20 years, CPI has had at least eight people whose tenure as top editor or CEO lasted less than three years, with many of these coming and going in less than two years. That’s simply extraordinary. Any Board or CEO can make a mistake in choosing a particular leader, but when mistakes or misfortune are experienced so repeatedly that four CEOs in a row have had their tenure cut short (even if for different reasons), you would think that a systemic problem has been revealed, and that the Board itself would see the need for change throughout its own ranks and culture. If that occurred at CPI, it surely came too late.

Along the way, with various twists and turns, I heard of a Board that “lacked any interest and any responsibility” for adopting a flawed strategy, and then for dealing with its consequences. One that hired a CEO over the stated objections of the predecessor CEO and most of the staff, but then “turned their back” on their own choice, and again declined to assume any responsibility for the resulting misadventure, only to “hire poorly again.”

I heard about Board meetings that included lots of discussions of stories, but none about finances. Huge briefing books that did not appear to the managers who prepared them to have been read. Board leadership was “not tough” and “never strong,” even in the eyes of people very fond of them as individuals.

The upshot was a place “riven by internecine warfare for years if not decades;” another former leader called it “a nest of vipers.” Some of this was quite public.

Repeated strategic missteps

Strategic mistakes, again, can and will occur, but at CPI they seemed to happen repeatedly. A merger with the Huffington Post Investigative Fund in 2010 failed to yield the revenues projected at the time. But so did a successor strategy promising huge traffic and 50,000 paying members championed by John Solomon (who has gone on to infamy elsewhere), which was advocated at the time by CPI management, vouched for by the Bridgespan consultancy and funded in large part by the Knight Foundation. The Columbia Journalism Review explored the mess in detail, but introspection at the CPI Board level was not evident.

A second Pulitzer, awarded for the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) founded by Lewis as a part of CPI, came a couple of months after ICIJ and CPI had acrimoniously split.

A more recent strategy focusing on “inequality,” announced four long years after a similar shift by the Ford Foundation highlighted the issue, is widely seen to have made CPI less ambitious in its reach and thus less distinctive in its approach rather than more so, although those who devised the strategy continue to stand by it.

The Board “didn’t know what it didn’t know,” one veteran leader told me; another said it was “disconnected from journalism” and almost always “easily persuadable.”

Through all of this, however, the Board itself remained remarkably stable. Fully six of the 12 members listed on the CPI site have served continuously since 2016.

I asked two of those directors, Bruce Finzen and James Kiernan, to comment on the gist of this column. Finzen has served on the Board since 2006, including as chairman from 2011-2014, and before and after that as treasurer; Kiernan, currently co-chairman, has served as chair since 2017 and on the Board since 2012. Here is the full statement they sent me:

Over the respective periods of time we have served on the the Board of Directors of the Center for Public Integrity, the Board has always acted prudently, consistent with its fiduciary obligations, in taking actions it reasonably believed were in the best interests of the organization.

CPI spending by year, in absolute dollars (blue) and in 2024 dollars adjusted for inflation (orange). ICIJ split off in 2017.

The business results suggested by the chart just above of CPI spending for the years 2006-22, both in absolute dollars and in 2024 dollars adjusting for subsequent inflation, tell the story another way. They are the farthest thing from the steady growth one would ideally see in a newsroom. Indeed, over 17 years, the adjusted numbers show only one three year period of prolonged growth (2007-10) and nine different years of contraction— that is, an organization shrinking more often than not. (I focused on expenses, by the way, because publicly reported annual revenue numbers are distorted by GAAP accounting for multi-year grants.)

Hobbled by program funding

The other recurrent theme of my conversations was how much and how often CPI had permitted limited-purpose program funding to dictate its editorial priorities, resulting in loss of focus, distinctiveness and sense of mission. At one point, restricted program funding may have been as much as 90% of the total. Multiple leaders, who see little eye to eye, agree that “many of [our] funders had very narrow interests,” and “we were seriously handicapped by having narrow funding.”

This support was accepted because general operating support seems to have been unavailable, but “while they were focused on keeping the lights on, they lost focus on the journalism” they wanted to be doing. The result, too often, and repeatedly over time, was a newsroom, that “didn’t know what it wanted to be.” An excessive overall focus on institutional foundation support had left membership giving too low a priority for far too long.

Summing up

What to make of this, beyond mourning the loss of CPI itself, and its good journalism? A great deal of the focus, as I hope the narrative above reflects, should be on a Board that seems to me, fairly consistently, not to have provided the necessary leadership. Beyond that, I hope that funders of CPI, and especially institutional funders, will take time to reflect a bit on how much of this has come as a surprise to them. In large measure, it should not have.

Over the last 20 years, more than $150 million in 2024 charitable dollars has been spent at CPI. The return on that considerable investment has been far from zero: the good done by the journalism remains, no matter the fate of the newsroom as an institution. Journalists have been developed and trained, and also gone on to do important work elsewhere.

But $150 million is a lot of money, and the opportunity costs of having deployed it this way were also considerable. We do an often excellent job in our business of scrutinizing the activities of others. The fate of the Center for Public Integrity should remind us that we need to be equally rigorous in holding ourselves to account.