The Center for Public Integrity, one of the earliest nonprofits built to tackle big nonprofit investigative journalism projects, is shutting down. The grim details of trouble with finances and management over the last two years were detailed in an article Tuesday by Sewell Chan, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.

I’m interested in a different perspective — what founder and driving force Chuck Lewis created in 1989, then how it flourished and eventually stumbled. The rise and fall, pardon the cliché, seems to mirror the vastly expanded nonprofit sector’s current sustainability challenges.

Chan reported that Lewis has Alzheimer’s, so I did not reach out to him for comment. But I did speak with Bill Buzenberg, a top lieutenant and one of his successors. “Chuck did a fantastic job starting and running the center,” Buzenberg said, regarding the nonprofit investigative journalism shutting down. “He was my mentor and is a hero in the investigative field. I can’t say enough good things about him.”

Specifically, Buzenberg continued, Lewis had two essential skills to lead the work. He knew how to spot the most ambitious investigative projects and how to pull them off. Plus, he could raise money. Those different talents are hard to find in one body; some of Lewis’s successors had both, others not.

I got to know Lewis a dozen years ago. By then, he had retired as executive director of the CPI, though still highly involved as board chair. We talked about academic work he took on with collaborators, wrestling with the issue (still a lively one) of how best to measure the impact of an organization’s journalism. I wondered whether there might be a way to work together. He was receptive, but we couldn’t figure out what that might be.

An example of how Lewis was forward-looking: He emailed in 2013 that an issue fascinating to him was “the evolving relationship between for profit news organizations and nonprofit news organizations. Now we have seen the joint hiring of a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter by the Washington Post and American U/The Investigative Reporting Workshop. What is the future of such collaborations and partnerships that also involve joint publication? That’s relevant vis-a-vis nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, etc.”

Read the full article about nonprofit investigative journalism by Rick Edmonds and Tom Jones at Poynter.