Link: http://propublica.org/

Via this article at Poynter.org, comes news of the creation of a new investigative journalism organization, ProPublica. The organization is funded by Herb and Marion Sandler, who built up Golden West Financial Corporation in California from 2 branches to one of the largest S&L operations in the country, before selling it and becoming very wealthy in the process.
This articlet at the New York Times provides some insight into how and why ProPublica was created, and the motives of the Sandlers. Some excerpts follow:

Since the late 1980s, the Sandlers used their wealth to finance a variety of nonprofit organizations, including Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and Acorn, the grass-roots organizers. They helped found the Center for Responsible Lending, where they are among the largest benefactors. They are also among the very few philanthropists in the country who finance basic scientific research, at the University of California at San Francisco. And they have set up nonprofits to conduct research into parasitic diseases and asthma. In 2003, they started the Center for American Progress, which is intended to be a liberal counterweight to the heavyweight policy centers of the right, like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.

...the Sandlers have a larger vision for what their new organization will accomplish. “They used to tell me that they weren’t really interested in investigative journalism per se,” Lewis says. “But they saw it as a way to make the world a better place.”
Lowell Bergman, a New York Times and “Frontline” contributor who has long been friends with the Sandlers, says much the same thing. “Herb doesn’t like crooks, liars, predatory lenders and lots of other people that you and I wouldn’t like,” he says. “He would like to put them out of business and throw them in jail.”