It’s not every day that a reporter gets to cover a big, headline-generating congressional hearing that involves facts and themes he helped to disclose as a result of his own determined digging. For months, David Heath has doggedly pursued stories for us and The Seattle Times on the largest bank failure in U.S. history, Washington Mutual. Heath’s groundbreaking work has documented how management practices at the banking giant and its subsidiary became an invitation for fraud. For instance, former employees told tales of sales people at Long Beach Mortgage coaching brokers how to break the rules, including using faked and forged documents. Now these very topics are the subject of hearings before a U.S. Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, which corroborates many of the themes Heath reported with internal emails and other documents.

That can be a thrill for any reporter. But it’s also exciting because it underscores our unique purpose: To pursue original and compelling journalistic investigations that matter and have prospects for making a difference.  Let others report on the agenda in Washington. Wherever possible, we prefer to lead the way and uncover what’s not being reported elsewhere.

Though we’ve been around for less than a year, our important stories are getting noticed in journalism circles, too. Danielle Ivory and Lagan Sebert documented how government secrecy keeps the public from knowing about high levels of atrazine, a widely-used herbicide, in their drinking water; their work was a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors award. A video by Heath, Sebert and Amanda Zamora, “The Fate of a Subprime Loan,” explored the mortgage meltdown in human terms by focusing on a loan to a legal Salvadoran immigrant. Now that’s been nominated for a Webby, an international award for excellence on the Internet.  Meanwhile, Sebert and Christine Spolar earned a third place award from the National Press Photographers Association, for a video on Afghan contractors.

For many journalists, it’s ultimately not about awards, gaining recognition, or even the thrill of covering a hearing you helped make happen – but telling the world about something that matters and needs fixing. Even so, I want to tip the hat to our nonprofit journalistic colleagues at ProPublica, who have just won a Pulitzer, the most prestigious prize in journalism, for a truly compelling account of life-and-death choices at a New Orleans hospital in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Reporter Sheri Fink revealed how, with time running out as floodwaters rose and generators wound down, doctors decided which patients would be evacuated, and which would receive lethal injections. All of us aspire to that kind of excellence – stories that matter and likely wouldn’t be known or told without support for investigative reporting.