Scripps Expands National Investigative Bureau for Television

CINCINNATI, Feb. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The E.W. Scripps Company (NYSE: SSP) is deepening its commitment to quality journalism with the expansion of its television investigative reporting operations in Washington, D.C.

The Scripps Washington bureau, home of Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS), is becoming a fully multimedia, national news organization pursuing enterprise and investigative stories for broadcast TV, newspapers and digital platforms.

Scripps has earned a solid reputation, through its local news organizations and across all media platforms, for providing investigative reporting that informs and empowers the communities it serves.  Now Scripps is enhancing its TV investigation team to provide stories with national impact in addition to the award-winning local stories the company covers today.

The enhanced TV investigation team will:

• Focus on investigative stories for television that are national in scope as well as those investigations that will be part of "team investigative coverage" in partnership with local TV investigative units.
• Launch a more intense review and analysis of government decisions and the direction of government agencies that dramatically affect all communities.
• Develop in-depth investigations through a partnership with Scripps newspapers, digital news teams and the award-winning SHNS, now in its 96th year of national and international coverage from its offices in Washington.

Leading this new, high-profile effort, are two professionals who are vastly experienced with TV investigative journalism.

Lawan Hamilton is the executive producer of the investigation team.  She has expertise in both investigational journalism and the application of technology for advanced storytelling.  Most recently she worked as data projects manager at Scripps headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio.  In this role, she combined her computer assisted reporting skills to create data-driven visualizations to showcase investigations and specialty data for all Scripps broadcast properties across multiple digital platforms.

Prior to that she worked as executive producer of investigations and special projects at KSHB in Kansas City, Missouri, a Scripps property, and also as an investigative producer specializing in computer assisted reporting at KNXV-TV ABC 15 in Phoenix, Arizona, a Scripps station. 

Jim Osman is the lead reporter for the investigative bureau. He is an 18-time Emmy Award winning investigative reporter who most recently was a member of the investigative unit at KYW-TV in Philadelphia. From 2002 through 2005, Osman was a reporter for the ABC 15 Investigators at KNXV-TV in Phoenix, Arizona.

Osman is an honors graduate of Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a Journalism degree. He has also completed the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University and interned at NBC'S Meet the Press with the late Tim Russert. 

Hamilton and Osman join Kristin Volk, a TV reporter in the Washington bureau, and a team of investigative reporters and editors who produced 11 major investigative projects during 2011. The projects ran on Scripps TV stations, newspapers and digital platforms, as well as in hundreds of other markets served by Scripps Howard News Service.  

For Scripps, 2012 is shaping up to be a year of tremendous growth and exciting new opportunities for expansion. In addition to the national TV investigation bureau, Scripps is blazing new trails into social gaming, creating new national programming for the fall, and focusing on unrivaled election coverage with Democracy 2012.

Scripps (www.scripps.com) delivers quality journalism and creates valuable marketing environments through television stations, newspapers and a growing menu of digital products and services that now includes social games. Creative and mission-driven employees "give light so the people can find their own way" at 19 television stations in major U.S. markets and at newspapers in 13 markets.

SOURCE The E.W. Scripps Company