The Center for Public Integrity has a new website, redesigned to further our mission of using investigative journalism to confront inequality in the U.S., showcase audio storytelling and multimedia in addition to our long-form investigations, and adopt the most up-to-date mobile and accessibility standards.
“After nearly a year of thoughtful design and audience engagement work, we’re proud to reveal a new website that is clean, accessible, intuitive and easy to navigate, and that showcases our best investigative and collaborative projects in the spotlight they deserve,” said Public Integrity Director of Audience Lisa Yanick Litwiller. “As we continue to share new ways of connecting with readers, like audio versions of our stories or special newsletters, our new website is designed to grow with us.”
Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country. When work started on a new site last year, one priority for Design Editor Janeen Jones was to preserve access to important past journalism, including projects that have been recognized with the Pulitzer Prize and investigations considered definitive on vital topics.
At the same time, Jones, who was named to the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Emerging Leaders Council last year with the redesign as her area of focus, wanted the site to better reflect Public Integrity’s shift toward a focus on investigating inequality.
The new site distinguishes between long-form investigations, quicker updates on stories and a growing presentation of journalism in audio, multimedia and Spanish-language formats. Readers can learn about our staff, our mission and what guides our work by accessing our freshly designed “about us” section.
Jones, who joined Public Integrity two years ago after a career at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Politico and newspapers including the York (Pa.) Daily Record and Asbury Park (N.J.) Press, redesigned article layouts to provide a more immersive experience for readers and improved navigation across the site.
Collaborations with readers and other journalism organizations, including data sets, documents and toolkits that can be used to localize our investigations or take action related to them, are all featured more prominently on the new Public Integrity homepage.
To launch the more user-friendly redesigned website, Public Integrity used Newspack, a platform WordPress built with news organizations like us in mind and with support from the Knight Foundation and Google News Initiative. Newspack websites are mobile-responsive and incorporate best practices for accessibility.
To understand further how accessible the site and our work is to people with disabilities, Jones has secured a $5,000 grant from INN to assess and make further improvements.
The redesigned site also features new ways to donate to Public Integrity, which does not accept advertising or charge readers and relies on the support of individuals who care about the mission. Among the accepted forms of payment, readers can use cryptocurrency to support Public Integrity here on our site via The Giving Block, a blockchain giving solution that is used by more than 1,000 nonprofits, universities and faith-based organizations.
Public Integrity’s reporting has led to hundreds of law and policy changes, has forced federal and state agencies to release information critical to the public interest, has held corporations to account for abuses of power, and has been recognized with the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards.
During the pandemic, we published secret Trump White House documents about the spread of the pandemic over the course of a critical six-month period. Local journalists and public health officials turned to Public Integrity’s weekly stories about the data to guide their own response to COVID-19.
Other recent projects included:
- Cheated at Work, an investigation into repeated wage theft by employers and the weak federal penalties that fail to stop it.
- Criminalizing Kids, an investigation into the disproportionate impact police presence in schools has on kids of color and students with disabilities.
- Barriers to the Ballot Box, a 50-state look at voting rights and access and creation of an eight-year dataset on polling place closures that was a finalist for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting.
- Hidden Epidemics, a look at the toll that climate change is having on the health of vulnerable communities and how unprepared the government is to respond.
- And Hidden Hardships, an investigation into the extent to which immigrants produce the nation’s food supply but have been shut out of COVID-19 health and economic protections.
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