ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine Create $400,000 Katrina Story

This coming week's New York Times Magazine features a cover story by Sheri Fink about a hospital's tough choices during Hurricane Katrina. The story was co-produced with ProPublica, the non-profit news site started by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger and former New York Times investigative editor Stephen Engelberg in 2007.

According to a "Talk of The Times" newsroom chat with Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati, he and an editor at ProPublica did a "back-of-the-envelope calculation... of what the total cost of the piece actually was, figuring in several years of reporting and nearly a year of editing." They priced Fink's story at $400,000 to complete.

If that sounds like a lot to spend on one article, that's because it is. In March 2009, Marzorati told an audience at a Council for Advancement and Support of Education event that a typical Times Magazine cover story is "north of $40,000, and often, if a war zone is involved, considerably more."

An organization needs some deep pockets to underwrite a project like that. ProPublica is funded by The Sandler Foundation, which is run by Herb and Marion Sandler, founders of Golden West Financial Corporation, which is now part of Wachovia, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo. (You may remember their names being used in a controversial Saturday Night Live sketch about the sub-prime mortgage crisis that dubbed them "People who should be shot" last year.)

In 2008, the Times Magazine's Joe Nocera wrote about the Sandlers' creation of ProPublica and quoted Paul Steiger as saying, "They told me they were thinking about spending $10 million a year on investigative journalism." According to Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp, the Times has run four previous ProPublica collaborations.