by Vianna Davila, Liz Sharp and Myron Avant

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ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as the journalism community more broadly, while ensuring equal opportunities for all. Each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2025; here are our past reports.

We believe that it is imperative to staff our newsroom and business operations with people from a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives. We are committed to removing barriers that have traditionally excluded qualified applicants, including people with disabilities, those from low-income backgrounds, veterans, people of color and women.

“For 10 years ProPublica has reported on its efforts to grow and diversify its staff. That important work continues,” ProPublica President Robin Sparkman said. “We are committed to covering a range of issues in our journalism. To do that effectively we need employees with varied perspectives and backgrounds.”

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 186 full-time employees at the start of 2024 to 193 in 2025.

We’ve added resources to the staff supporting this work, including hiring a talent acquisition manager who has worked to refine our hiring process to make the candidate experience more fair and consistent. We’ve created organizational partnerships to provide access to investigative journalism training and build community with journalists from a variety of backgrounds. We’ve fostered mentorships so that any employee can benefit from a colleague’s experiences and we spearheaded the creation of a shared holiday calendar to promote greater awareness of diverse religious celebrations and avoid scheduling conflicts.

Our Diversity Committee comprises more than 50 ProPublicans who volunteer their time to work on initiatives that are pitched and run by the staff. The current co-chairs are Vianna Davila and Liz Sharp.

Our work in this area can also be seen in our journalism. Throughout 2024, we reported on the adverse effects of abortion restrictions on women, including those who died after their states banned the procedure. Our reporting resulted in new federal rules that went into effect last year that are aimed at speeding repatriations of Native American remains. Last February, the U.S. Department of Justice started working with a sheriff’s office in Wisconsin on a written policy on how to respond to incidents involving people with limited English proficiency; this followed our reporting on how a grammatical mistake in Spanish led sheriff’s deputies to wrongly blame a Nicaraguan dairy worker for his son’s death. Our reporting on systemic failings by the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat people with mental illnesses, including in cases in which veterans went on to kill themselves or others, resulted in commitments to increase staffing by the VA secretary.

We also partner with news organizations across the country. Last year,

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