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When a data team at ABC investigated contamination in drinking water around the country, it turned into a major collaboration between the data folks, journalists at the company’s owned stations, ABC News and National Geographic. The upshot was local reports as well as a documentary series called Our America: Trouble on Tap, which has also run on Hulu.
“Centralizing that very difficult and time-consuming discipline of data analysis makes good business sense, from an investigative journalist standpoint,” said John Kelly, director of data journalism, ABC Owned Television Stations. In addition to the contamination investigation, his group has delved into the numbers to uncover revelations about other thorny topics, such as police stop-and-search records and COVID testing.
Kelly made his remarks at a TVNewsCheck TV2025 conference panel session on joint news efforts between local station journalists and national news enterprises. During the session, which took place last Wednesday, the panelists revealed other examples of what they’ve accomplished, along with insights into the collaborative process and their learning curves.
The E.W. Scripps Co. has been undergoing a massive overhaul of its news operation, evolving a national news unit that works in tandem with local stations. “One of the end results of that is a significantly larger group of journalists on the street than we’ve had,” said Dean Littleton, SVP, local media at Scripps.
In Lafayette, La., Scripps is in the middle of the transition right now, moving from four reporters to more than a dozen, Littleton noted.
To handle the much more