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The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity had asked former Washington Times star John Solomon to join in 2010, and he proposed an ambitious plan to bring the nonprofit into the digital age. Solomon had helped negotiate a merger between the center and the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, the nonprofit wing of the Huffington Post—a deal that had been expected to bring in a surge of Web traffic. But Solomon, who is the former editor of news and investigations at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, fixated on the center’s sourcing on a BBC documentary it had worked on—Solomon insisted the sources had been paid, because a paid consultant appeared in it. The whole debacle has cost the center dearly—it had a $2 million budget gap last year and has shed more than a third of its staff.
