ProPublica officially begins

ProPublica, an independent non-profit newsroom, is ready to roll. The project will produce investigative journalism that will then be available for publication at newspapers across the country.
Today on ProPublica's site, the project's top guns, Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian and former investigative editor of The New York Times welcomed visitors.
The pair also outlined some key initiatives the ProPublica staff has set into motion.
“Breaking on the Web” will be an aggregate of investigative journalism produced in the U.S. and a feature called “Scandal Watch” will track the top five investigations at any given moment.
From Steiger and Engelberg's welcome:

Five months ago, ProPublica was an idea, a rudimentary Web site and a nearly empty office in Lower Manhattan. Today, we take our first concrete step in building an investigative publishing platform that will produce original stories focusing on betrayal of the public trust and abuse of power. Our goal is to do stories that would otherwise escape notice and to follow up on work done by others that demands change or is being overlooked. This is the beginning of what we see as an experiment and we invite your comments and suggestions on stories, or on how we can make our organization more useful to readers. We have nearly completed our hiring (more than 20 out of perhaps 27 news staff) and reporters are at work on some promising avenues of inquiry. You will see those results in the months ahead. In the meantime, we offer what we hope will be a thorough, thought-provoking look at investigative stories that are breaking elsewhere.

To check out the project click here.