In 2022, ABC News took major steps forward as a news division in the digital space. We expanded our ABC News Live streaming service which has seen triple-digit growth each month since its launch across 26 distributed platforms. ABC News Live closed out 2022 with over 400 million hours streamed, 41 million in September alone. During special events and breaking news ABC News Live viewership has spiked to over 11.5 million viewers.

In addition to industry-leading breaking news coverage, in 2022 our digital teams created immersive long-form series and documentaries, introduced innovative digital magazines for social media platforms, created chart-topping podcasts, and dug deep with unmatched statistical analysis for important national stories on FiveThirtyEight.com.

ABC News Digital invested in long-term reporting of major events in a new way, embedding in communities after the mass shootings in both Buffalo, N.Y. and Uvalde, TX. These endeavors reflect ABC News Digital’s ongoing commitment to exploring issues in-depth, including gun violence, education, foreign policy, climate coverage and systemic racism in America.

ABC News Digital proudly shares a selection of our original storytelling - from immersive video and deep data journalism to moving photography and informative social media, for Edward R. Murrow Award consideration.

ABC News Digital

In the wake of the horrific mass shooting last May that killed 21 people in its hometown of Uvalde, Texas, a prominent local paper announced it would be happy for the day when the nation's media spotlight would shine anywhere else.

“The usual trajectory for mass shooting coverage involved an invasion by the national media, followed by a hasty retreat,” wrote the Uvalde Leader-News. And so, it was worth reporting, the local newspaper added, that “ABC News has a different concept for Uvalde.”

ABC News has been chronicling how the epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings has changed this one small corner of rural America, and what happens when a community like Uvalde has to bury its loved ones, mourn its children and figure out who it is in the wake of one of the deadliest days in the nation’s peacetime history.

ABC News Digital’s “Uvalde in Focus: The Kids of Robb Elementary” showcases the world through the eyes of eight Robb Elementary school students, including some who were injured during the massacre. It centers on photos taken by the students themselves as well as video profiles and captions where they tell us about the images. Our team partnered with Canon, who donated cameras for the kids. All of the children say they have now found a passion for chronicling their community. Their images and testimonials give insight into what it is like to be a kid in a small Texas town upended by unthinkable tragedy, while also honoring the lives of the 21 people who died on May 24. Thus far, ABC News Digital has published more than 200 stories on Uvalde.

ClimateNOW is a first-of-its-kind social-based multimedia magazine that delivers the most urgent developments in climate change natively on the ABC News audience's Instagram feeds.

This unprecedented social-first publishing effort leverages platform-specific functions to present immersive storytelling directly to emerging audiences on their most existential topic.

The weekly 10-panel magazine blends text, graphics, animation, and video in a magazine-style prestige design package that publishes straight to Instagram, employing IG's carousel and story features to present complete news stories wholly within the platform.

ABC News Live Prime with Linsey Davis' nightly streaming news broadcast, provides analysis and context to important news stories of the day, but its great strength lies in the desire to delve deeper, linger on stories that matter most to viewers. Unlike a traditional newscast which often devotes less than two minutes to a story, Prime prides itself in longform. The length of a piece is based on the strength of its content. Prime is also the rare hybrid that mixes longform with engaging and topical interviews with newsmakers and stakeholders. In just three years, Prime has become the first multi-award winning streaming newscast and the content engine of the most watched streaming news channel.

The Women Left Behind is a digital-only longform story produced by Prime, tied to the one year anniversary of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Taliban takeover. It is about those who couldn’t escape, the fifty per cent who have lost almost every single gain of the last two decades, the women and girls whose lives haven’t just gone back years but centuries. For us, this story was about shining a light on the repression, examining how some Afghans are fighting back, and confronting the Taliban, face-to-face, about their broken promises, lies and abuses.

This groundbreaking digital investigation had immediate and continuing impact after examining what happens to the plastic bags consumers return to retail stores to be recycled and helped paint a clearer picture for many who have wondered whether items they drop off are actually being recycled.

The six-month endeavor involved the ABC News investigative team and nine ABC owned or affiliate station partners deploying 46 trackers bundled up in plastic bags at recycling bins in Target and Walmart stores across ten states. The results revealed a troubling reality. Just four out of 46 trackers made it to facilities that say they are involved with recycling plastic bags. Half turned up in landfills or incinerators. The team boldly challenges everyone involved in the process, engaging with retailers like Target and Walmart and also sitting down with the American Chemistry Council; their spokesperson eventually acknowledged in a stunning interview that the retail recycling program does not work to the scale they would want. As a result of the report, both Target and Walmart were removed from the national recycling directory of plastic bag recyclers.

The story of the racially motivated murders at the Tops supermarket in East Buffalo was international news. The deeper story, however – the dynamics of a mass shooting motivated by racial hate, its long-term impact on the affected community, and the decades of government neglect that helped create the environment for it to happen – while there to see, was explored by few if any major media.

In the process, ABC News Digital gave voice to many in the East Buffalo community who had spent their lives feeling marginalized. As we worked to earn the community’s trust, East Buffalo in turn opened its arms to us and shared their stories. We were privileged to spend a year witnessing the community’s profound strength in the face of heart-wrenching pain, and their determination not to allow racial hatred and violence to define their lives and future.

YOUR VOICE YOUR VOTE How Trumpism Took Over the Michigan GOP — And Tore a Small Community Apart

ABC News’ 538 uses statistical analysis to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, economics, and American society. The gap between America’s two political parties has only grown sharper over the past four years, so 538 went to Ottawa County, Michigan, a place that epitomizes the forces tearing the country apart. As the genteel lakeside community moved left during the Trump era, conservative forces refused to go down without a fight. They took over local government, ruling with an iron fist which prompted protests and went so far as to alienate former members of their own party.

While others in 2023 attempted to tell Haiti’s story from afar, ABC News was the only news organization to do so from inside Haiti itself. Our team remained in the country for extended periods allowing us to reveal the depth of a crisis the world didn’t fully know was happening. Gang violence is rampant and the threat of kidnapping constant.ABC News’ reporting on the crisis in Haiti directly impacted senior decision makers in international governance, which in turn directly affected the lives of Haitians themselves (for the better). Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. talked about ABC’s reporting series following a historic October 2023 U.N. Security Council vote on assistance for Haiti. Greenfield said: “This summer, ABC News reporter Matt Rivers traveled to Port-au-Prince to shed light on the dire crisis facing the Haitian people…And one 12-year-old boy told ABC – …‘I would like the shooting to stop, so people can be at home and have normal lives.’ This young boy, and people across Haiti, are crying out for help. And they are calling on the international community to step up. Today, we answered that call.” ABC News viewers were moved to donate more than $500,000 to the World Food Programme. The funds were used to distribute crucial food supplies to thousands of Haitians displaced by gang violence.

This GMA Digital series is a poignant exploration of what happens when safe havens of the LGBTQ+ community are violated.

Through moving testimonies from survivors of the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, this GMA Digital series sheds light on the personal toll gun violence has taken on the LGBTQ+ community and examines the deeper connections formed by turning to each other for comfort through love, drag and inner spirit.