> Who are finding these “ pro publica studies” and who benefits? How does your average person in HN who is prone to have issues from student loan debt, rising healthcare costs, or cost of living going to benefit from these?
It's a worthwhile question and I would answer this way. Where most national news desks all run the same 7 headlines, ProPublica tends to bring more new topics to the table. This particular topic isn't novel; just less covered.
I have a positive example of PP reporting; you might appreciate it. An early PP story reported on how campaign ads heavily fund news orgs covering elections. It seems a significant conflict of interest and it's gotten little discussion before or since.
When news orgs were first forced to be transparent about campaign ad buys, most outlets released the data in pdf images to hamper tracking of ad buy dollars. PP setup a site to crowdsource (I was one) converting those PDFs to data. The data got converted and the ad buys got released as intended.