NBC O&Os, Nonprofits Make News Deal Work

Six months into them, the NBC Owned Television Stations' partnerships with four nonprofit news organizations are bearing fruit, resulting in an uptick in investigative reports on local newscasts.

WMAQ Chicago produced a piece that questioned whether a well-known community organizer improperly spent millions of dollars in government grants — a subject brought to the TV news team’s attention by the station’s partner, ChicagoReporter. KNBC Los Angeles and its partner, noncommercial KPPC-FM, collaborated on several stories, one of which uncovered that a local teacher arrested for sexually abusing students was paid to retire by the Los Angeles school district — preserving a pension and benefits. In Philadelphia, WCAU has started adding arts and culture reports to its news mix courtesy of its partner, the public TV and radio broadcaster WHYY. And in February, three years after federal stimulus money was distributed, the NBC stations in New York, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego and Hartford, Conn., all did locally focused stories on where all that money went. Those stories all were based on data provided by ProPublica, the investigative news service that works with WNBC and gives other NBC stations access to stories ideas and research before they go public.