Investigative reporter Jessica Lussenhop felt she was just hitting her stride at ProPublica when the email showed up in her inbox: “Are you the voice of ProPublica?”
“That is a very heady idea,” said Lussenhop. The much-lauded nonprofit news organization was finally going to launch its long-considered podcast and the showrunners were on the hunt for a host.
Lussenhop, then four years into her tenure in the newsroom’s Midwestern bureau, had just finished one of the biggest stories of her career. A longtime print reporter before joining ProPublica, she signed on with the Pulitzer-winning organization to build her investigative chops. Things were going well.
Shifting to podcast host would put an end to her investigative work. But it would allow her to indulge in some of her other passions: geeking out about reporting and working in audio. Lussenhop was already familiar with the audio medium having done a fellowship at This American Life in 2019. So she applied.
The show, Paper Trail, launched on May 14, 2026. In each episode, Lussenhop and a ProPublica reporter detail a previously published investigation from the site. The stories vary widely but the episodes are stitched together by a very specific thread: explaining what it takes to do investigative reporting.
In this edition of Depth Perception, we ask Lussenhop about the goals for the show, why Paper Trail has made her more hopeful, and how her work as a reporter has changed her view on some of journalism’s oldest rules. —Jenna Schnuer
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I know so many reporters who want to work at ProPublica. How did you get started there?
I had applied for other jobs at ProPublica but hadn’t been successful. Then they had this opening on their Midwest team, and I’m from Minnesota. It just felt a bit like this actually could be my job. I understood even before I got here how much ProPublica is a really mission-driven place. It was a chance to sort of fortify the investigative reporting scene in my home state and cover a community that I grew up in and would like to give back to.
That meant leaving the chance at doing audio work behind for a while. You were OK with that?
During the interview process they put you in a panel conversation with the other reporters in the bureau. Melissa Sanchez, who I’m very lucky to now call a friend, was in that panel, and I remember she asked me, “You’ve been working a lot in audio, and if you come to ProPublica, you’re not going to do that. How do you feel about that?”
I think what I wound up saying to her was, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this decision. I think what I’ve learned is that podcasting is actually more about almost making art and the mission driven work at ProPublica is about making a difference. So I feel like I’ve got a choice: I can make a difference or I can make art. I feel more strongly about doing this [difference-making] work.”
I had the opportunity to jam my foot in the door and force them to teach me how to be a real investigative reporter. That, to me, felt more valuable to my future. But I very explicitly was like, “If I never touch audio again, I’m OK with that.”
Did it ever come up again early on at the job?
When I got hired, during my first trip to the New York office, I had a conversation with my now boss, Ginger Thompson, and she clearly had a glint in her eye about making a podcast. She was like, “Oh, you have this experience. What do you think about making a podcast, or would you want to be involved?”
I probably was too glibly kind of like, “No, I don’t think so. I really want to concentrate on building up my investigative skills.”
Tell me about hosting Paper Trail. What’s it like?
I don’t even think I realized how much I like talking about the craft. I just like talking about the nuts and bolts [of journalism and reporting a story]. I really want to hear the whole story from start to finish. I don’t think that it’s just because I’m a journalist and I’m a wonk about this stuff. My job now, really, is to sit in the role of the listener too. It demystifies the whole thing and makes it so you can wrap your head around this whole investigative thing we do here, which sounds really fancy and impenetrable. It’s actually not. It’s just asking questions, asking uncomfortable questions, and being really persistent. Then relying on your colleagues to help you when you don’t know quite what to do next. So I’ve been enjoying the hell out of just talking to people about, “How did you do this?”
And when I ask those questions, it is coming from a very genuine place of “please help me understand this.” My colleagues have done things that I, in a million years, would never have and take big swings that I would never have had the audacity to think I could do. And then after I talked to them, I’m like, “Well, maybe I could.”
That is also something I want to share with the audience. This doesn’t have to feel so mysterious. Not everybody aspires to be a journalist, but [I want] to inspire people to be engaged with the world around them and some of the troubling things that maybe you notice around you. Rather than sort of shrug your shoulders and feel powerless about it, if you want to get your own information and, I don’t know, feed us some of that information, you too can effectuate change. Sometimes that sounds a little Pollyannaish and maybe a little too optimistic, but I actually believe it.
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How do you decide which piece you’re going to focus on for each episode?
We get to pick from this glorious catalog of amazing journalism. We decide based on various factors like, is this going to be a good one for audio? We really need to pull listeners in and get them invested in us. So we’re looking for stories where the reporter is a really great storyteller. Or the story itself has a great narrative. Maybe in the reporting process they’ve pulled a lot of documentation that’s in audio form that we can play on the radio that really brings the whole investigation to life.
And then there’s just also factoring in the full life cycle of a ProPublica story, going from we publish a story [to] something in the world changes. We talked in the trailer a lot about trying to see investigative journalism as a work of optimism. We write [follow-up] stories every time our investigations have impact but I don’t know that readers are connecting all those dots because that impact can take years and years and years.
[On Paper Trail] we can show the full life cycle of a ProPublica story through [an] episode. We can show that this journalism changed the world in real life.
What are you going for with the tone of the show?
It should feel like you are having a conversation about something in the news with a friend at a bar. There’s nothing I love more than discussing journalism over a drink. I just love talking about this stuff.
What’s your usual drink of choice for these conversations?
Oh my goodness, I’m a millennial dirtbag so I drink a lot of IPAs.
The public’s trust in journalism is not in a great place right now. How do you think your show can help rebuild trust?
It’s not like I’m sneaking vegetables into the storytelling or anything. And the worst thing for this show would be if it ever felt preachy. I don’t want people to feel we’re [saying], “Well, we know what’s really going on, and this is how we did it, and you’re going to listen and pay attention.” We want to deliver it in this way that’s organic. We like to have a little bit of a light touch with it.
Again, I’m a geek about this stuff. Sometimes in these conversations, I will go down a really wonky rabbit hole and then my producers will [tap] me on the shoulder like, “Pull up the plane. You’re just nose diving into journalism-inside baseball.”
“The fun of investigative journalism is that there's like a secret around a corner. You get to shine a light into that corner, and when that happens, it's just magical.” —Jessica Lussenhop
Give me an example of how you explained some aspect of journalism without going too wonky.
There was a moment in our second episode, what I’ve been calling a towing scandal. One of the people who really helped those reporters get that project off the ground was a source inside of the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, and it was a source they had to keep anonymous.
I think that everybody knows that journalists have anonymous sources. But when people don’t trust journalists, [an anonymous source probably] feels weird and creepy. And if you don’t trust the institution to begin with, why on earth would you give that [source] any weight?
I liked that we got the opportunity to be like, “OK, here’s how they figured out what was going on.” They had a DMV source. But then, Dave Altimari, the reporter at the Connecticut Mirror, very plainly [explained that the source] could have gotten in trouble for helping. [That source] was the only person who could be like, “Hey, here’s how this towing system works.” If his name [was] in the newspaper, he might have gotten fired.
I mean, everybody understands that. We all have jobs and want to keep them. It’s something so basic. When we keep people anonymous, we do it for a reason. And I love the opportunity to [explain the] “here’s why.”
Do you think working as an investigative reporter at ProPublica helps you in your role as host of the show?
It helps me, as a host, bring that authentic and genuine excitement and thrill of discovery that comes with investigative journalism. The fun of investigative journalism is that there’s like a secret around a corner. You get to shine a light into that corner, and when that happens, it’s just magical. To have done that myself quietly off on my own doing my reporting by myself, so it’s fun to commune on the mic with my fellow reporters about those moments. I think you can hear it in our voice. In the first episode, people keep pointing this out to me, I yelled, “Holy shit,” because that was a holy shit moment. I really meant it because I just feel in my stomach and in my toes when you get to these moments. I feel really genuinely excited to get to try to share how that feels with people.
Further reading and listening from Jessica Lussenhop:
