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by Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez, 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, and each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2023; here are all our past reports.

Our Commitment

We believe that it is imperative to staff our newsroom and business operations with people from a broad range of backgrounds, ages and perspectives. We are committed to recruiting and retaining people from communities that have long been underrepresented, in journalism broadly and in investigative journalism especially. That includes African Americans, Latinos, other people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 160 full-time employees at the start of 2022 to 172 in 2023, due in part to the launch of our global public health team and additions to our visuals, audience, development, finance and talent teams. In addition to recruiting talent and awarding financial stipends for students to attend journalism conferences, ProPublica’s diversity efforts last year included our largest presence yet at journalism affinity conferences and the development of an investigative editor training program.

We also worked to formalize some of our previously volunteer-run diversity efforts and have included some of our broader diversity goals in ProPublica’s first strategic plan.

The 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, Melissa Sanchez and Liz Sharp.

Breakdown of Our Staff

As with last year, we tracked candidates through the application and interview process. Out of 30 positions filled in 2022, 55% of the candidates we interviewed identified as women and 42% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. Of those we hired, 40% identified as women and 47% as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white.

The percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 59%, the same as last year. In editorial positions, the percentage of staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 59%, the same as in the two prior years.

For the fifth year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. In editorial positions, women represented 49% of the staff.

Last year we began collecting demographic information about our board of directors. Half of the 14 people on the board identified as women, and 71% of the directors identified as non-Hispanic white.

As we’ve said since 2015, part of our commitment to diversity means being transparent about our own numbers. Here’s how our staff breaks down:

Race and Ethnicity: All of ProPublica (Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.) Race and Ethnicity: Editorial (Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.) Race and Ethnicity: Managers (Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.) Gender: All of ProPublica (Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.) Gender: Editorial (Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.) Gender: Managers (Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.)

Note: The data is based on employees’ self-reported information. Recognizing that some people may identify as more than one race but not identify as a person of color, last year we began stating numbers in terms of people who “solely identify as non-Hispanic white.” We hope this will provide more specificity and accuracy. The employee information is as of Jan. 1 of each year. Managers are defined as staff members who supervise other people and that group does not include all editors. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding. Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.

New Initiatives

Investigative editor training: ProPublica in December announced its new Investigative Editor Training Program for applicants who want to learn how to manage, edit and elevate investigative projects that expose harm and create impact. This initiative, led by Talia Buford and Ginger Thompson, was designed to increase diversity in the next generation of investigative editors. The program will launch this spring with an internal training for ProPublica staffers interested in becoming editors. In June 2023, we will welcome the first external cohort of the yearlong program with an in-person editor training in New York. After that, participants will be paired with ProPublica senior staff as mentors and receive additional virtual training for the rest of the year. (Apply here.)

Sensitivity subcommittee: Led by Andrea Wise, Colleen Barry and Maya Eliahou, this group formed in 2022 after numerous internal conversations about concerns that regularly surfaced when reporters were working on stories touching on sensitive topics, particularly suicide and sexual assault. Volunteers created a standing Slack channel to create a space for the staff to leverage and share its collective knowledge and experience on these and other topics that require a careful and thoughtful approach.

Strategic plan: Leading the journalism industry on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts is one of the priorities ProPublica staffers and leaders are including in our five-year (2023-2027) strategic plan. The plan outlines the organization’s progress and initiatives over the past 15 years while acknowledging that there is more work to do. We plan to dedicate more resources to making investigative journalism careers accessible and sustainable for journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.

Our Ongoing Efforts

We think about our efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism); recruiting talent and improving our hiring process; and inclusion and retention. Last year, as travel and in-person diversity initiatives became more feasible after the initial years of the coronavirus pandemic, ProPublica increased its presence at conferences and continued to offer virtual training and development opportunities.

Building the Pipeline

Conference stipends: ProPublica offers funding to help student journalists attend conferences. This effort is coordinated by Mollie Simon, Ash Ngu and Adriana Gallardo. In the seventh year of the program, we teamed up with The Pudding to award 25 stipends of $750 each. Because of the pandemic, we gave students the option to use the money for either journalism-related expenses or conference expenses. This year, following feedback from our 2022 stipend cohort, we are working to focus this initiative on supporting journalists from diverse backgrounds who have a distinct desire to pursue investigative journalism.

Emerging Reporters Program: The program provides financial assistance and mentorship to eight students for whom investigative journalism might otherwise be inaccessible so they can pursue early career opportunities in the field. The program includes a $9,000 stipend, virtual programming and admission to a journalism conference. This is the program’s eighth year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford. Check out our most recent class and find out more about the program.

ONA (Online News Association) Diversity Breakfast: A breakfast at the ONA conference, facilitated by Ruth Baron and Steve Myers, paired managing editors, executive editors and other leading professionals in the industry with journalists from historically underrepresented communities. Nearly 40 journalists participated in the event. We have hosted both virtual and in-person breakfasts at the conference since 2015. In 2023, we will be shifting our efforts to other investigative mentorship opportunities.

Chicago external mentorships: Mentorship sessions with Free Spirit Media, which provides teens and young adults in communities of color on Chicago’s West and South sides with media literacy and media production opportunities. Led by Duaa Eldeib, workshops include sessions on the art of pitching stories and conceptualizing data.

Data Institute: ProPublica, in partnership with The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and OpenNews, held a workshop for journalists on how to use data, design and code. Twelve journalism students, professors and working journalists participated in the weeklong online training last summer. The Data Institute started in 2016, founded by ProPublica journalists to make high-quality technical training accessible to more journalists.

Mentorship: Working with the Journalism Mentors program, a group of ProPublica journalists had one-on-one mentoring sessions with 17 people last year. This mentorship opportunity, which can include general advice or portfolio reviews, can be arranged as an in-person session during affinity conferences. The sessions can also be arranged outside of the traditional conference season. Melissa Sanchez, Rui Kaneya and Max Blau coordinated these efforts last year. (Interested? Sign up for a session.)

Recruiting and Hiring

Affinity conferences: Newsroom staff and masthead members from ProPublica and three other nonprofit newsrooms (The Marshall Project, The Texas Tribune and The Trace) came together at the Asian American Journalists Association and the joint National Association of Black Journalists/National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference to host mixers and other professional development opportunities. ProPublica staff also attended the Native American Journalists Association conference and conducted resume reviews. This work was led by Maya Miller and Irena Hwang.

Salary transparency: Starting last fall, in advance of a new law that affects postings for jobs based in New York City, ProPublica began publishing salary ranges for all posted job openings, regardless of geography. Management also shared salary ranges internally for positions in which four or more people hold that job. This was done to ensure transparency about pay among staff and potential applicants in an effort to achieve equity in the newsroom.

Salary equity: ProPublica management annually analyzes salaries in job categories where there are at least four employees and, when necessary, adjusts those salaries to ensure equity by race and gender in each job and location group, while taking into account years of experience. This analysis started in 2021. We do this because we want to try to eliminate the effects of any unconscious bias in setting salaries.

Rooney Rule: We require that hiring managers interview at least one person who does not self-identify as solely non-Hispanic white. In addition, every application must be read by at least two people.

Freelancer guide: Last fall, ProPublica published a guide for freelancers interested in pitching an investigation to ProPublica. We designed the guide to formalize the pitch process and level the playing field for how freelance projects are presented and considered. Submissions will be reviewed by editors on a rotating basis. ProPublica will respond to anyone who completes the form, even if their proposal is not accepted.

LRN candidate outreach: Editors with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network started offering office hours to potential applicants. They also offered more intensive mentoring to a select number of applicants who weren’t accepted in order to develop promising proposals over time. Finally, LRN editors were present at affinity journalism conferences, where they met with interested applicants in an effort to help them with the project-development and application process.

Inclusion and Retention

Unconscious bias training: In 2021, ProPublica hired Paradigm Reach to conduct ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion training with staff. The training is required of all new managers.

ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song that matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to meet each other, develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions.

Welcoming new hires and focusing on internal culture: A subcommittee led by Michael Grabell and Ariana Tobin continued to meet last year to consider ways to make the newsroom more inclusive and equitable, including how to prevent burnout, how to build community while working remotely and ways to make the organization’s expense policy welcoming to people who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Diversity Committee office hours: We have continued to offer a casual hangout on Zoom twice a month where ProPublicans can chat with the Diversity Committee co-chairs to brainstorm about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, ask questions about ProPublica’s ongoing DEI programs or chat about diversity-related concerns in a more intimate setting outside of the monthly committee meetings.

Interested in Working Here?

Here is our jobs page, where we post new full-time positions, and here’s our fellowships page. At the bottom of either page, you can sign up to be automatically notified when we have a job or fellowship available.

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by Eli Hager

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The New Mexico Corrections Department has lost track of nearly two dozen prisoners in its custody who are serving life sentences for crimes they committed as children, an error that could keep these “juvenile lifers” from getting a chance at freedom under a bill likely to be passed by the state Legislature within days.

As the legislation was being drafted, ProPublica asked the department for a list of all state prisoners who were sentenced to life as juveniles. Using court records, the news organization then identified at least 21 such individuals not on the state’s list. Many of them had been locked up for decades.

Denali Wilson, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who helped discover the problem, said such carelessness on the part of the state government makes it plain that “when you throw away kids in adult prison, they are lost.”

Or as one of the forgotten prisoners, Sigmundr Odhinnson, told ProPublica in an email from behind bars, “We are, quite literally, missing children.”

This is not just a philosophical issue. The New Mexico Legislature is on the cusp of passing a bill that would give a new shot at parole to all state prisoners serving life or lengthy sentences for crimes they committed when they were juveniles, provided that they have served at least 15 to 25 years of their time, depending on their offense.

But to do that, the corrections department will first need to identify all of these individuals to help schedule their parole hearings.

“When the entity that is imprisoning people isn’t a reliable source for who it is imprisoning, how do we know the people exist?” said Wilson.

Wilson started advocating for juveniles serving decadeslong sentences in adult prison when she was still in law school. (Minesh Bacrania, special to ProPublica)

The New Mexico legislation is premised on multiple recent Supreme Court decisions and studies of brain science finding that kids are impulsive, prone to risk-taking, bad at understanding the consequences of their actions and highly susceptible to peer pressure (often committing their offenses among groups of friends), all of which make them less culpable than adults when they commit crimes. They are also, according to the high court, more capable of redemption.

The brain doesn’t fully develop until around age 25, extensive research shows, and most people are likely to “age out” of criminality.

The bill wouldn’t guarantee freedom to juvenile lifers in New Mexico, but it would provide them a chance to articulate to the state parole board how they have changed, including whether they’ve taken accountability for their actions, followed prison rules and completed educational programming.

Prosecutors opposed the legislation in previous years but dropped their opposition after changes were made to account for the seriousness of certain offenses.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office has indicated that she will likely sign the legislation, if it is passed, by early April; it would go into effect this summer. In the meantime, officials in her administration could not answer basic questions about the number of prisoners affected and were unclear about which office is responsible for maintaining that information.

Carmelina Hart, spokesperson for the corrections department, initially sent ProPublica the names of 13 people in New Mexico’s prison system who were sentenced to life as children, which she said was the extent of the cohort.

But a disclaimer below the list read, “Due to inconsistencies and mistakes over decades of data entry, as well as ensuing attempts of varying success to fix previous inaccuracies over that time, it is virtually impossible to conclude that all of these data are entirely correct.”

When challenged about whether there are in fact many more New Mexico juvenile lifers, Hart said there possibly had been a miscommunication with her information technology team. She added that some people who had committed their crimes as kids (thus making them eligible for relief under the new legislation) might have turned 18 before they entered NMCD custody from local jails or juvenile detention facilities, causing the record-keeping confusion.

Asked for the names of all prisoners who would be affected by the bill, Hart said that only the state court system could provide such a list.

That caught Barry Massey, spokesperson for the New Mexico administrative office of the courts, off guard. “I am surprised that the Corrections Department claims it has no such records, given that the agency has to know the sentences imposed on someone in order to track their incarceration,” he said.

Massey said the courts do not maintain a database of individuals in prison, nor any records his team is capable of searching by prisoners’ ages at the time of their offenses. “Only the Corrections Department would have that,” he said.

Because these kids were prosecuted as adults, he added, their cases can look the same as adult ones in court data.

To that, Hart, the corrections department spokesperson, emailed back, “LOL! Now I’m confused too!”

She later said on a phone call, “Come on now, people don’t just fall out of our dataset.”

Then she said the department doesn’t need to identify those affected by the legislation until the governor signs it. “We’re not going to look for people who are not defined in the law,” she said. “You can’t put the cart before the horse.”

Hart emphasized that the agency does have records of every person serving in its facilities, and that if the bill becomes law, NMCD will take the appropriate steps to ensure that it is in compliance.

“There Are People We Still Don’t Know About”

The problem of the missing juvenile lifers would not have come to light if not for the efforts of Wilson, the ACLU of New Mexico’s lead attorney on the issue of children sentenced to decades in adult prison.

Back when she was still a law student at the University of New Mexico in 2017, Wilson and a group of colleagues started asking the corrections department for information on everyone in its custody serving long sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles. It was alarming, she said, to learn of the prisoners’ ages at the time they went in — 15, 16, 17 — and then see their ages now — 40, 45, 50.

She knew these people had been responsible for real harm: in many cases, a loss of life.

But, she said, she still felt a sense of indignation that hasn’t left her.

According to a 2012 Sentencing Project survey, Wilson learned, 79% of those serving life sentences for crimes committed as juveniles nationally had witnessed regular violence in their homes growing up, and 47% were victims of physical abuse. In many cases, they had committed their offenses while caught up in gang activity that they’d long since renounced, or had been getaway drivers during armed robberies gone wrong.

Meanwhile, just 1% of former juvenile lifers who are given a second chance at a free life end up committing another crime, according to a 2020 study in Philadelphia.

Wilson also learned that New Mexico, despite having banned the death penalty for children three decades before the Supreme Court did, had not yet addressed extreme juvenile sentencing. (Twenty-six other states and Washington, D.C., have done so.)

Using the list of juvenile lifers identified for her by the corrections department, she and the incarcerated people’s family members started sending them a regular newsletter, sharing updates from her team’s advocacy at the state Capitol for legislation just then starting to be considered. She also relied on the names provided by NMCD to find individuals she might be able to help in court, in some cases challenging their decadeslong prison terms as cruel and unusual punishment.

Several years into this work, Wilson got a call from the father of one juvenile lifer who hadn’t been named in the department’s data. But she had already learned of the case on her own, so she didn’t think much of it.

What came as a shock to Wilson was when, last spring, she clicked on an email listserv for New Mexico attorneys and read about a case involving a middle-aged prisoner who’d been behind bars since he was a teenager.

She had never heard of this man.

“I had the initial thought, ‘Oh shit, what have I been doing wrong?’” she said. “I just couldn’t figure out how I didn’t know about him.”

Still a relatively young attorney, Wilson experienced a bout of impostor syndrome, she said, noting that the people she advocates for “have been in prison longer than I’ve been alive.”

She had to scramble, given that by this point she was considered a legislative expert on extreme youth sentencing — and one of the main questions she always got from lawmakers assessing the proposed legislation that she was working on was “How many people will this impact?” Still using the list provided by the corrections department, she had been repeating a specific number of prisoners she believed would become eligible for parole under the bill.

But now she was realizing that there might be more who the department had never identified to her.

Sometimes prison systems misspell prisoners’ names on paperwork and in other contexts, so Wilson searched NMCD data using alternate spellings. “But they’re just not there,” she said.

The most disconcerting part, she said, is that she discovered the problem by chance.

“I feel certain that there are people we still don’t know about,” she said. “I don’t know, and I don’t know how to know.”

“I Want to Do Something Good Instead of Bad”

One subset of New Mexico’s juvenile lifers who seem to have been disproportionately forgotten are those serving their time in out-of-state prisons.

Jerry Torres and Juan Meraz, for example, are both in the custody of the New Mexico Corrections Department for crimes they committed as juveniles in the state, yet they are locked up in Arizona — in a for-profit prison operated by the company CoreCivic.

Neither has appeared on the department’s lists of juvenile lifers, even though they too should be getting a parole hearing (by Zoom, that is) under the upcoming legislation.

Torres is serving a life sentence for a murder he went to jail for as a 17-year-old in 1996. He emphasized in a phone interview that he didn’t want to cause additional pain to his victim’s family by speaking about the legislative issue.

Torres said that because he is not in New Mexico, he feels even more unknown than the other juvenile lifers.

“I’m not surrounded by as many people possibly affected by this,” he said, given that he is watching the bill’s progress from a state away.

If he is located by the department and given the parole hearing that the law should provide, and if he is then actually paroled, Torres said, he just wants to do “everything I missed out on because of the decisions I made,” like simply going to a store, playing baseball at the park with his family and getting a commercial driver’s license to be a truck driver. “It’s as simple as that,” he said. “I want to be productive. I want to do something good instead of bad.”

Meraz, also in his mid-40s, shot someone when he was 15.

While insisting on not minimizing the harm he caused, he said he has done nearly every educational program there is to do while locked up, including parenting classes even though he doesn’t have any kids.

Meraz recently had major colon surgery. “Fifteen or 20 years of good health out there, I can’t ask for anything more,” he said of what he dreams of if he gets this parole opportunity.

Wilson, the lawyer, said that if the law is passed, she will be specifically asking the department to review all out-of-state prisoners for their ages at the time of their offenses.

Her one solace is that whenever a juvenile lifer materializes whom she hadn’t known about — which continues to happen — they often know about her and about the legislation, sometimes down to which New Mexico state representatives are and are not voting for it.

“And I’m like, oh right, this is people’s lives — they are paying attention,” Wilson said. “We will find them.”

Help Us Identify New Mexico Juvenile Lifers Who May Qualify for Parole Hearings

If you are aware of someone who committed a crime as a juvenile (under the age of 18) in New Mexico and who has since served more than 15 years in prison for that offense, please let us know. As we continue to cover this issue, we will routinely ask the New Mexico Corrections Department if they are aware of the individuals we learn of who may be eligible for a parole hearing if proposed legislation passes. Please enter their information below. If you would prefer to talk to a reporter before you share, please email Eli Hager at Eli.Hager@propublica.org. We appreciate you sharing your story and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of what you tell us.

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