Thanks for the kind words about ProPublica. It's exciting to be around so many talented journalists and to get to work on great projects with them.

I run a small team (five of us) of developer/journalists. We're in a new-ish field of journalism called "news applications." Essentially it means we make software instead of using words or pictures to tell journalistic stories. There are crews like ours (some bigger, some smaller) at the New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, the Guardian in the U.K., and elsewhere.

Our work includes the Recovery Tracker http://projects.propublica.org/recovery and the recent "Docs for Dollars" project http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars that analyzes payments from pharmaceutical companies to doctors.

You can see pretty much all of our work at http://www.propublica.org/tools