ABC News Studios Unveils Slate Of Non-Fiction Projects As Part Of Official Launch

deadline.com:

ABC News Studios unveiled a slate of narrative non-fiction projects as part of its official launch, with three feature documentaries and 15 series and specials in production.Plans are to produce more than 100 hours of programming for ABC, Hulu, Disney+, National Geographic and other platforms in 2022.

Dawn Porter; Irene Taylor, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard; and Stanley Nelson are among those attached to projects.Reena Mehta is senior vice president of streaming and digital content, and Mike Kelley, the vice president and ABC News Studios lead, will oversee the creative and business direction of the unit.David Sloan will serve as senior executive producer and creative lead of ABC News Studios, while Jacqueline Glover is head of documentary for Onyx Collective and oversaw the initial slate of feature documentary films for ABC News Films.“We’ve been creating longform for quite a while, but we are really formalizing it under the ABC News umbrella,” Mehta said.

She said that ABC News President Kim Godwin has been investing in streaming “and also thinking about where the audience is and how we can serve them.” She said their team includes journalists, but they also are looking at staffers with different backgrounds.“We want to also tell diverse untold stories,” she said. “Because we also manage podcasts and have close relationships with Disney, Hulu, NatGeo and our internal content partners, we can really fuel IP across a lot of these lanes and have been really empowered to do that from a monetary investment perspective as well as a staffing perspective.”Kelley said that they plan multiple launches a month across platforms.He also said that “one of the strengths that we have as being part of ABC News is that we are generating