ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network Selects Five New Partners for Its 50 State Initiative

ProPublica has selected five new partner newsrooms and local journalists for its Local Reporting Network. This is the fourth group selected as part of the organization’s 50 State Initiative, a commitment to partnering with one newsroom from each state by 2029.

The reporters are Holly McDede with KQED in San Francisco; Alex Acquisto with the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader; Samantha Melamed with The Philadelphia Inquirer; Nichole Manna with The Tributary in Jacksonville, Florida; and Richard A. Webster with Verite News in New Orleans, whose partnership with us is being extended for an additional year. They will begin their investigative projects on Oct. 1.

KQED (California) — Holly McDede
McDede is a reporter at KQED, where over the past four years she has reported accountability stories, from overdose deaths at a San Francisco hotel to an online #MeToo campaign that forced a reckoning at an elite high school in the city. She previously worked as a justice reporter at KALW public radio, winning the ongoing coverage award from the NorCal Society of Professional Journalism award for “The Progressive Prosecutor,” a series on Chesa Boudin’s tumultuous first year as San Francisco’s district attorney. At KALW, she also managed “tbh,” a podcast by and for teenagers, and more recently contributed reporting for “The Homework Machine,” a podcast on how AI is reshaping K-12 schools. McDede is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she was part of the investigative reporting program.

**Lexington Herald-Leader (Kentucky) — Alex Acquisto **
Acquisto is a politics and health reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader. A native Kentuckian, she was hired in 2019 as a Report for America corps member to cover public health in Eastern Kentucky. She led the newspaper’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and has since reported on the effects of climate disasters in rural communities, the political and medical impacts of Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban, as well as the impact of transgender health care bans on trans youth. In 2024, she moved to the politics team, co-reporting on the conduct of a Democratic state representative accused of sexual harassment and misconduct by multiple women and banned for life from a Louisville strip club; that series triggered a formal ethics investigation and spurred calls for his resignation. Previously, Acquisto wrote for the Bangor Daily News and The Forecaster in Maine. For her project, Acquisto will be collaborating with her colleague Taylor Six, the Herald-Leader’s criminal justice reporter, who has been recognized for her coverage of incarceration, the legal system, correctional health care and substance use disorder in Kentucky.

**The Philadelphia Inquirer (Pennsylvania) — Samantha Melamed **
Melamed is an investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where her work has exposed nonprofit fraud, no-show government jobs and construction practices that caused an epidemic of rowhouse collapses. Her reporting has prompted reforms, such as the creation of a city jail oversight board. Her investigations into police misconduct in homicide cases, including a database of some 100 cases of coercion, fabrication and hidden evidence, has so far contributed to more than a dozen overturned murder convictions. In addition to the Inquirer, Melamed’s work has appeared in Reveal and The Atlantic and in now-defunct newspapers including the Philadelphia City Paper and the Cambodia Daily. Melamed won the Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism for a series on never-ending probation in Pennsylvania.

The Tributary (Florida) — Nichole Manna
Manna is an investigative reporter at The Tributary in Jacksonville, Florida. She has covered the criminal justice system for more than a decade, with a focus on jail conditions, police brutality and wrongful convictions. This year, she published a series that dissected a 1993 death penalty case and questioned whether the defendant received a fair trial, for which she received an Online Journalism Award. In 2024, she exposed medical neglect in the Duval County jail, which resulted in the sheriff’s office ending its $98 million contract with its medical provider; the work won a Green Eyeshade Award. Her 2021 series about the ZIP code with the lowest life expectancy in Texas helped push medical resources into the neighborhoods.

Verite News (Louisiana) — Richard A. Webster
Webster is a senior reporter at Verite News in New Orleans and a returning participant with the Local Reporting Network. Founded in 2022, Verite is a Black-led nonprofit news organization with a twofold mission: producing in-depth journalism and training a new generation of journalists. With ProPublica, Webster has investigated allegations of abuse against the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, claims of racial and economic inequities in Louisiana’s Road Home recovery program following Hurricane Katrina and how Gov. Jeff Landry’s policies have impacted the state’s criminal justice system. Following his reporting, the state dropped lawsuits seeking more than $100 million from Hurricane Katrina victims and a state court vacated the death sentence of a man convicted of the murder of his former girlfriend’s toddler. Webster previously was a member of The Times-Picayune’s investigative team, reporting on numerous special projects including on childhood trauma and the state’s mental health care system.

ProPublica launched the Local Reporting Network at the beginning of 2018 to boost investigative journalism in local newsrooms. It has since worked with more than 90 news organizations. The network is part of ProPublica’s local initiative, which includes offices in the Midwest, Northwest, South and Southwest, plus an investigative unit in partnership with The Texas Tribune.