#MuckReads will curate the day's essential accountability stories, discovered and shared by our reporters and editors, and readers like you—stories about the abuse of prisoners, the education levels of our country's legislators and the laundering of public funds. Our mission is to do journalism that has real-world impact, and we're especially keen to find and promote work from others that has the same impetus.

Since ProPublica launched, we have been highlighting the best investigative and accountability journalism around the Web. #MuckReads is the next evolution of our "Investigations Elsewhere" feature (an archive of "Investigations Elsewhere" is available).

#MuckReads is primarily Twitter-driven. You can contribute by simply including the hashtag #MuckReads when you tweet an article. (Here's an example.) If you don't use Twitter, just email your recommendation to[email protected]. We will look through your recommendations and add our favorites to the #MuckReads page, ProPublica's homepage, and to our daily email. We will also retweet favorites from @ProPublica—all giving full credit to you.

Even though our feature's name has the word "reads" in it, we are interested in everything: stories, interactive graphics and databases, comics, podcasts, video, etc. What matters is that the journalism is essential, excellent and focused on holding the powerful to account. We also hope to turn the flow of recommendations into an ongoing newsroom resource.

Your participation is key to making #MuckReads a success. Be ruthlessly discriminating. Evaluate a reporter's assumptions and arguments. Local stories suggestive of larger, perhaps national, problems make great #MuckReads candidates.

We believe strongly in giving credit where credit is due and intend that #MuckReads will provide a transparent way to share your recommendations with our newsroom and readers. 

#MuckReads was inspired by Mark Armstrong's @Longreads, a community-driven effort to aggregate the best long-form journalism on the web. Since @Longreads launched, we have actively contributed to its stockpile of stories, tweeting our favorite long-form journalism with the hashtag #longreads. Our experience participating in @Longreads led us to rethink our Investigations Elsewhere feature.

#MuckReads is an experiment in social aggregation. The feature as you see it is just the beginning. We've got big plans for feature upgrades and integration with Facebook, but first we want to see what works and what needs more tinkering. If you have suggestions or find problems, please email me a note or tweet @ProPublica.