NBC News Expands Investigative Unit

NBC News has bolstered its investigative unit with the addition of two award-winning

Richard Esposito

journalists, Richard Esposito and Mark Schone, both formerly of ABC News. Esposito has been named Senior Executive Producer, Investigative Unit, NBC News, effective immediately. In this role, he will help guide and manage the network’s overall investigative direction, working closely with the existing investigative teams to enable deeper reporting and exclusive enterprise reporting. Schone joins the NBCNews.com investigative unit, led by Investigations Editor Mike Brunker, as an editor, effective April 22.

Esposito brings years of investigative experience to NBC News. He will work with the highly-decorated roster of investigative correspondents, producers, and reporters across all broadcasts and platforms of the NBCUniversal News Group, including “Today,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Rock Center with Brian Williams,” “Dateline,” NBCNews.com, MSNBC and CNBC, as well as the NBC Owned Television Stations.

“NBC News has made a serious commitment to further enhance our investigative journalism and to establish ourselves as the dominant force for enterprise reporting,” said Antoine Sanfuentes, NBC News Senior Vice President. “Richard and Mark are bold, experienced journalists known for their intrepid work. By building on the outstanding efforts of our veteran teams and utilizing our multiple on-air and online platforms, we now have an unparalleled capacity to continue breaking news and dig even deeper into important stories.”

Esposito was senior investigative reporter for ABC News. A journalist with more than 30 years of newspaper and television experience, he has focused on homeland security, national security, and the criminal justice system during his time at ABC. His reporting has earned numerous awards, including an Emmy, a Peabody Award for Investigative Journalism, and the George Polk Award for television reporting. He shares in a Murrow Award for coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden and a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Prior to entering television news, Esposito was City Editor at Newsday, Metropolitan Editor of the New York Daily News, and Editor of the Sunday News. He is also the author of “Bomb Squad: A Year Inside the Nation’s Most Exclusive Police Unit.”

Schone was digital managing editor of the ABC News investigative unit. Previously, he was the executive news editor of Salon.com and a senior contributing writer at SPIN magazine. He shared in duPont, Emmy, Peabody, IRE and Murrow awards during his tenure with the ABC News investigative unit. His work has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among many other publications, and he received an Edgar Allan Poe Award for coauthoring the national bestseller “Son of a Grifter.”