Pros
-Great colleagues. Some of the best reporters and editors you'll find anywhere. Lots of smart, caring, thoughtful people committed to producing good work. -Ample time. Reporters have the liberty to develop stories over the course of many weeks or months (though this can be a curse as well as a blessing) -Ample resources generally. Access to premier research tools and databases, great in-house support for data viz and web development. -Decent salary and benefits
Cons
-Dysfunctional management structure created a weird and unhealthy office culture. The newsroom seemed to have grown very quickly and there wasn't a great plan about what to do with its resources. -I often felt unclear about exactly what my job was, but I felt like asking too many questions about such things was discouraged (ironically enough, given PP's mission). Some managers seemed more concerned about how they appeared to their superiors than they did about leading their teams or producing the best work possible. In general, CYA was the order of the day. -Too much emphasis on big bombshell investigations could lead to perverse incentives. When your newsroom's driving mission is "accountability," every story needs to be framed in terms of a finger-pointing, who-did-what-wrong narrative. I worked on many stories where that was the right frame ... and others where it was a real stretch. But when reporters and editors work for months on a single investigation, there's a lot of internal pressure to produce flashy results, even if it turns out there's not much there there. This isn't unique to PP, but I think it's especially pronounced there because the long time horizon for projects makes reporters and editors feel desperate to score.