Hi Reader,

Our 2021 Annual Report is out this week, detailing remarkable accomplishments that ProPublica made last year. We hope you’ll read the full report, but I wanted to highlight some of the achievements that your support helped make possible.

Some of our most innovative work used complex data and created groundbreaking visuals and stories to help readers make sense of it all. We analyzed a massive trove of secret IRS data, shining a light on systemic inequities that allow America’s wealthiest citizens to pay little or nothing in federal taxes. We scrutinized billions of rows of Environmental Protection Agency data to create the most detailed U.S. map of cancer-causing industrial air pollution, revealing more than 1,000 hot spots. We also processed bacteria sampling from the U.S. Department of Agriculture with genomic sequencing data to show that salmonella is running rampant through the chicken industry, and our interactive database lets you look up the salmonella records of the plants that produced your poultry.

ProPublica won a News & Documentary Emmy — our fourth Emmy Award and first solo one — and we were a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. We won five National Magazine Awards, published with more than 70 partners to reach new and larger audiences, and hired 15 reporters to complete our regional reporting units in the Midwest, South and Southwest.

But we are proudest of the impact our reporting has spurred.

• ProPublica’s coverage of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was used to identify and charge suspects, and it was cited in subpoenas from the House committee investigating the event.
• Florida dramatically reformed a state program that failed to provide benefits for parents of brain-damaged newborns, including providing money for mental health services and retroactively distributing compensation.
• Following an outcry from our story on a Tennessee juvenile justice system that jailed children for a crime that doesn’t exist, the judge overseeing the system announced that she will step down.
• The federal government reversed a policy that disqualified individuals or businesses in bankruptcy from getting relief through the Paycheck Protection Program, extending PPP loans to thousands of borrowers.
• Our reporting on untested DNA evidence from rape victims in Baltimore and how police are using it helped solve the cold case of a 1983 murder.

Thank you for making this work possible. We couldn’t have done it without readers like you, and we look forward to another year of bringing changemaking stories to light.

Many thanks,
Robin Sparkman
President, ProPublica