Leanna Scachetti

Leanna Scachetti creates streaming-first stories about entertainment, culture and major events for WCVB, with reporting designed from the start for digital platforms as well as television. She serves as an OTT content producer and reporter, building video and written coverage that is optimized for connected TV apps, social video and on-demand viewing. Her beat centers on entertainment, sports and cultural experiences, often framed through behind-the-scenes access and the human stories inside large-scale events.

Streaming-first coverage of major events

At WCVB, Scachetti’s role is to rethink how local news covers big moments for audiences who are not watching a traditional newscast.

She produces original OTT segments and digital packages that apply the same reporting rigor as the station’s flagship newscasts while experimenting with pacing, format and visual style to fit streaming and social environments. Her work at the station includes coverage of the presidential election, key Massachusetts ballot questions, the Boston Marathon and the Celtics’ championship run, translated into digital-first stories that can be discovered and shared across platforms.

Scachetti’s path into this role runs through the Reinventing Local TV News Project, where she first joined WCVB as a video innovation fellow focused on digital content. After that fellowship, the station hired her full time as an OTT content producer, underscoring the value of having a journalist dedicated to streaming and social audiences. Her work has helped drive significant growth for WCVB across platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, demonstrating how tailored digital content can expand the reach of a local news brand.

She does not work in isolation from the rest of the newsroom; Scachetti also trains other reporters in digital storytelling and supports colleagues as a coach on how to adapt their reporting for streaming formats. Her focus is on building systems and habits that make digital production part of daily news work, rather than a side project. That blend of frontline reporting and internal coaching positions her as one of the station’s key drivers of its digital evolution.

Experiential sports and entertainment stories

Scachetti’s entertainment coverage leans toward experiential stories that show how major sports and cultural events feel on the ground. In her feature on Stonehill College students working hospitality roles at Boston Stadium during the FIFA World Cup, she highlights the students’ work behind the scenes, their professional training and the scale of the guest experience they help deliver. The story focuses on the elective course that places sport management students into VIP and guest services roles, illustrating how a global tournament becomes a hands-on classroom.

Her reporting stays close to the participants, following students through multiple matches as they manage flows of thousands of fans and interact with high-profile guests. She tracks how the work shapes their confidence and career aspirations, capturing their reflections on what it means to operate at a world-stage event. The piece frames the World Cup as something more than a spectacle; it becomes a training lab for emerging professionals, which is a recurring lens in her coverage of entertainment-related opportunities.

Scachetti brings a similar approach to music and pop culture stories, such as her coverage of a Berklee College of Music event where singer-songwriter Andrew Choi, the voice behind a character in the animated hit “KPop Demon Hunters,” meets with aspiring musicians. She focuses on the one-on-one advice Choi offers students and the way the “K-Pop and Beyond” experiential learning event connects global entertainment franchises to local education and career paths.

By centering students and early-career artists, her entertainment beat emphasizes pathways into the industry as much as the finished products that audiences see on screen.

Her Sail Boston coverage extends this experiential style to maritime culture, with stories that take viewers inside one of the world’s largest tall ships and into parades of sailors from around the globe. These pieces pair access to unique settings with clean, straightforward storytelling, making complex or distant events feel immediate and approachable.

Human stories behind culture and history

Beyond contemporary entertainment, Scachetti also reports on stories where culture and history intersect in daily life. In a feature about a Boston man who discovers his ancestor’s freedom papers while cleaning out his mother’s house, she documents both the physical document and the emotional weight of the find. The story uses close-up visuals of the paper and its language, tying a chance discovery in a family home to a larger narrative about ancestry and the history of enslavement and emancipation.

Her treatment of the piece keeps the focus on the individual and his family while acknowledging the broader context that makes the document significant. This reflects a pattern in her work: historical and cultural moments are framed through the experiences of people who encounter them in ordinary settings, rather than through abstract summaries.

That human-first framing carries across her entertainment features and historical stories, making them accessible without losing complexity.

Building new digital roles in local newsrooms

Scachetti’s current position at WCVB builds on a career spent experimenting with new formats inside local TV news. Before joining the station, she worked as a reporter, digital anchor and podcast host, where she helped establish a digital news desk and led an award-winning podcast that became a showcase for in-depth community stories. Her work on that podcast has been recognized with three national Edward R.

Murrow Awards, reinforcing her ability to adapt storytelling to emerging platforms while maintaining strong reporting standards.

Earlier in her career, she reported and anchored at another station where her coverage of Hurricane Michael was honored with an Emmy, demonstrating her capacity to handle breaking news and long-running recovery stories with the same care she later brought to digital projects. She has also been recognized on “40 Under 40” lists, signaling her impact as a younger journalist who contributes not only stories but also newsroom strategy.

Across these roles, Scachetti moves between front-facing storytelling and behind-the-scenes innovation, building positions such as digital anchor, OTT host and streaming content producer that did not always exist before she stepped into them. Her current work as an OTT content producer and reporter at WCVB continues that trajectory, pairing an entertainment-focused beat with a mandate to shape how local news reaches audiences who expect to watch on demand. Combined with her track record of awards for innovation and multimedia journalism, Scachetti stands out as a journalist whose coverage is defined as much by format and platform as by subject matter.