If you read anything from this week, make it the Los Angeles Times‘ series on cars and the poor, Wheels of Fortune. It’s timely, well reported and a potential game changer.

The report pulls back the curtain on Buy Here Pay Here car dealers, companies that sell used cars to people with little or no credit, charging them high interest rates, and when owners can’t make loan payments, repossessing the autos and reselling them again, and again.

In a world of instant news, it’s refreshing to read something that obviously took months to prepare. Read Part 3 close enough and you’ll pick up how Times reporter Ken Ben­sing­er describe one source taking multiple buses to work “on a hot summer afternoon.” It’s now early November, which means Bensinger and the editors and graphic designers who helped him on the package worked on this piece at least two months, if not longer. When was the last time you worked on a feature story for two months? This year I’ve worked on a total of one piece that took that long, and it was nowhere nearly as complex.

This is the kind of long-form non-fiction that’s getting a lot of hype thanks to the advent of online-only publishers such as Byliner and The Atavist. It’s also the kind of investigative journalism that nonprofits such as ProPublica began pursuing back in 2008 when the newspaper industry started to tank.

It’s nice to know that newspapers – at least some of them – still have the resources to invest in such important public service projects.

The organization is ProPublica, a privately-funded public-interest news Website that opened for business earlier this summer.

ProPublica aims to provide readers with the type of hard-hitting investigative reporting that’s most commonly associated with big-city dailies. So far the site is achieving this by mixing stories produced by its own 27-person investigative staff with links to the best public-service journalism being produced elsewhere.

ProPublica’s lofty goals aren’t the only thing setting it apart from other online-only news operations. The New York City organization has hired a who’s who of nationally ranked editors and reporters, starting with Editor in Chief Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Stephen Engelberg, former managing editor of The Oregonian and former investigative editor of The New York Times, is managing editor. Two of the most recent additions are Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, investigative reporters who won a Pulitzer for the Los Angeles Times in 2005 for their coverage of deaths at the city’s King-Drew Medical Center. Read about other reporters who’ve recently joined the staff in this story from Editor & Publisher, and in ProPublica’s own staff page.

Another thing that sets ProPublica apart: money. The non-profit is totally funded by philanthropic contributions from The Sandler Foundation, started by the former owners of Golden West Financial Corp., a savings and loan, and other organizations. Read more about how Herb and Marion Sandler got into the public-interest news business in this New York Times Magazine article on them from March 2008.

Such deep pocketed-connections will allow ProPublica to pursue its goal of running “the largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States” without having to worry about the two things that haunt newspaper editors and publishers these days, advertising and circulation. In that respect, the organization sounds a lot like National Public Radio, another ad-free news enterprise known for its ace reporting from around the globe. Whether ProPublica can duplicate NPR’s success remains to be seen – but I for one will be rooting for them.