ProPublica is a publishing project sustained by foundation grants. They can allow themselves the luxury of enabling free reprints.
It's not a model for everyone, and not a model to save serious investigative journalism.
Creative Commons fails to sustain journalism because it does not provide any option to easily pay journalists or publishers! Instead, it essentially browbeats people into "sharing" merely to get name recognition, and offers them the chimera of possibly tie-ins with such recognition that might lead to revenue.
But it doesn't work to provide livings for people. The Internet has to do that, sooner or later. Creative Commons is delaying the progress toward that day when the Internet can become more like real life with real paying jobs on it, and less like a sterile utopia in which only people with grants can live.