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MLK50 / ProPublica

U.S. left-leaning

Owned byBoth are independent nonprofits. MLK50: Justice Through Journalism is led by founder and editor Wendi C. Thomas; ProPublica is governed by a board of directors (current chair: Paul Sagan) and was seeded by Herbert and Marion Sandler of the Sandler Foundation.
FundingBoth rely on foundation grants and individual donations. MLK50 receives grants from the Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Kresge Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Borealis Philanthropy's Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, and others. ProPublica's 2024 revenue was $58 million, drawn from major foundations (Sandler, Knight, MacArthur, Ford, Carnegie, Open Society) and individual donors; it carries no advertising.
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

MLK50: Justice Through Journalism was launched on April 4, 2017, by journalist Wendi C. Thomas, who conceived the project during a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. It began as a one-year project to mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and examine what Memphis and the country had done with his legacy. Starting with roughly $3,000, it grew into a full nonprofit newsroom with an annual budget exceeding $2 million by the mid-2020s. Its coverage centers on the intersection of poverty, power, and policy in Memphis, and it explicitly aims to center voices of people 'pushed to the margins.' ProPublica was incorporated in 2007 and launched publicly in 2008, funded by a roughly $10 million gift from the Sandler Foundation; Herbert Sandler, who died in 2019, had made his fortune in the savings-and-loan industry. Its founding editor-in-chief was Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. From its start, ProPublica published long-form investigative work and made stories freely available to partner outlets. It has won multiple Pulitzer Prizes. During Trump's second term, beginning in 2025, ProPublica expanded its Washington bureau, hired national-security reporters, and dedicated significant resources to scrutinizing immigration enforcement, the Department of Government Efficiency, and financial disclosure records of more than 1,500 Trump appointees. AllSides, as of August 2026, rates ProPublica 'Lean Left' with high confidence. MLK50 and ProPublica have collaborated since at least 2019; in March 2025, ProPublica named Thomas a distinguished fellow to formalize continued joint investigations through April 2027.

Sources

  1. MLK50: Our Story
  2. MLK50 — American Journalism Project portfolio
  3. How Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision inspired the Memphis newsroom MLK50 — NBC News Academy
  4. ProPublica — Wikipedia
  5. ProPublica Media Bias — AllSides
  6. ProPublica — Media Bias/Fact Check
  7. ProPublica's 2025 Annual Report
  8. Investigative Reporting on Trump Administration — ProPublica
  9. ProPublica names Wendi C. Thomas as a distinguished fellow — MLK50
  10. ProPublica didn't just prove nonprofit journalism could work — it changed how investigative reporting is measured — Poynter
  11. Wendi C. Thomas reimagined what a newsroom could be — LatAm Journalism Review

Profile compiled 2026-09-03; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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