By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, May 2009
In late May 2009, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund announced that Lawrence Roberts — the Washington Post’s Investigations Editor — would join as the Fund’s Executive Editor. Arianna Huffington chaired the Fund’s Advisory Board; Nick Penniman was the Executive Director. The Fund had launched two months earlier with an initial budget of $1.75 million as one of the most-watched nonprofit-investigative-journalism experiments of the post-2008 recession era. The original FishbowlLA framing covered the staffing announcement in its straightforward press-release form.
Then
The Huffington Post Investigative Fund had been launched in March 2009 as an attempt to build a substantial nonprofit investigative-journalism capacity adjacent to the for-profit Huffington Post platform. The structural model — nonprofit fund producing investigative work that the for-profit platform would publish — was one of several parallel post-2008-recession experiments in supporting expensive investigative reporting through philanthropic-and-foundation funding rather than advertiser revenue.
Lawrence Roberts had been one of the Washington Post’s senior investigations editors prior to the Huffington Post Fund role. His move from a traditional newspaper investigative position to a nonprofit-and-platform-affiliated investigative role was structurally significant: it was one of the earliest substantial career moves from the legacy daily-newspaper investigative establishment into the nonprofit-investigative space that the post-2008 funding environment was building.
The $1.75 million initial budget was substantial for a launching investigative-journalism nonprofit in 2009 but modest relative to the kind of operating budget that would have supported a comparable investigative team inside a traditional newspaper. The model was structurally a bet that philanthropic-and-foundation funding could be aggregated at the scale needed to sustain serious investigative work over time.
Tina Dupuy’s FishbowlLA framing was a straightforward press-release pickup. The piece treated the announcement as a substantive media-industry development without yet making predictions about whether the structural model would work.
Now
The Huffington Post Investigative Fund went through multiple subsequent reorganizations. It was rebranded as the Investigative Fund in 2010-2011 and was eventually absorbed into the Center for Public Integrity in 2011-2012; the broader investigative-journalism-nonprofit consolidation cycle continued through subsequent years. The original 2009 structural model — nonprofit fund directly paired with a for-profit news platform — turned out not to be the durable form the post-2009 investigative-journalism-nonprofit ecosystem would settle into.
Lawrence Roberts continued in editorial leadership work across subsequent years. The broader category of legacy-newspaper investigations editors moving to nonprofit-investigative roles has become substantially more common across the post-2009 decade; the model the 2009 announcement previewed has become standard practice in the nonprofit-investigative-journalism field.
Nick Penniman has continued in nonprofit-and-democracy advocacy work. His subsequent organization Issue One (focused on money-in-politics reform) has been one of the more substantial American democracy-reform nonprofits of the post-2010 period.
Arianna Huffington left HuffPost in 2016 to found Thrive Global (covered in batch 5). The broader Huffington Post operation went through the November 2020 BuzzFeed acquisition and subsequent reorganizations.
The nonprofit-investigative-journalism category has substantially grown across the post-2009 interval. ProPublica (founded 2007-2008), the Marshall Project (founded 2014), the Center for Investigative Reporting / Reveal (operating across the same window), and many other operations have built out a substantial nonprofit-investigative ecosystem. The 2009 Huffington Post Investigative Fund was an early-cycle entry in what became a structurally significant category.
The 2009 piece reads now as one of the early documented moments of the post-2008-recession build-out of nonprofit-investigative-journalism infrastructure — captured at the staffing-announcement phase, before the cumulative pattern of nonprofit-investigative consolidation and the eventual emergence of a substantially larger nonprofit-investigative ecosystem.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.