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Now Pro Publica’s up to a staff of 28 (two Pulitzer winners from the LA Times have just agreed to sign on), and on Monday, Edward Wasserman of the Miami Herald judged it on its first big story. He was properly enthusiastic — he called Pro Publica a “dazzling new investigative reporting outfit” that had just collaborated with 60 Minutes on a “scathing examination” of al-Hurra” — the badly managed and little-watched news network the Bush administration set up in Virginia at a cost of $100 million a year to broadcast in Arabic to the Middle East. But Wasserman had qualms. “Why was Pro Publica using its philanthropic funding to, essentially, subsidize the cost of a segment for 60 Minutes, the most financially successful news show in the history of U.S. television? And how could Pro Publica claim to be filling a void when the Washington Post broke its own story on al-Hurra the same day (June 22)?
“Increasingly, nobody’s doing those stories,” Wasserman went on, “and the next wave of nonprofit funding should go to creating positions in regional newsrooms for reporters who will.”