Lee Enterprises organizes veteran reporters into regional teams to help local newsrooms with accountability projects

Lee Enterprises says it is now has a "public service journalism" team to collaborate with its local newsrooms on accountability journalism projects. The team comprises 12 veteran reporters in three regional teams that will help local reporters access "public records, track taxpayer money and government spending, examine data related to health, crime and safety issues, and serve as watchdogs for communities across the county," the company said in a news release run as a story.

Lee has 152 newspapers, third most of any U.S. company, about 75 of them dailies. It announced in May that it would lay off 400 people at 19 papers and its corporate offices, and the news release didn't mention the hiring of any new reporters, so the public-service team appears to be a way to use the chain's size for greater impact, much as No. 1 U.S. newspaper owner Gannett Co. does with its USA Today Network.

Team members have expertise in beats such as public safety, public health, government, social justice and the environment, the release said: "In their previous reporting roles both inside Lee newsrooms and in other news markets, these team members’ work has helped free the innocent, put the guilty behind bars and change laws. Work by these teams has already begun, with in-depth reporting on leading causes of death throughout more than a dozen Lee markets publishing in recent weeks and a recently published investigation, in partnership with ProPublica, on a systemic pattern of abuse and mistreatment of mental health patients in a state-run facility in Illinois."

The release didn't mention any team members by name, but said they include "a Pulitzer Prize finalist; three members of the nationally renowned ProPublica Local Reporting Network; a grant recipient from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting; a regional Edward R. Murrow Regional Award winner; top national award recipients from Investigative Reporters and Editors and the national Society of Professional Journalists; and an investigative reporter and researcher for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Better Government Association in Chicago."