Off the back of its international campaign The Truth Is Worth It – which placed its biggest global scoops under the spotlight – the New York Times is eager to show that, even with its involvement in worldwide reporting, there’s no place like home.

Helmed by the internal creative team at the New York Times, The Truth Is Local is centred around a series of storefronts made in collaboration with experiential design studio Local Projects. The installations are spread across the city’s five boroughs, which have been transformed to highlight a story uncovered by the Times regarding each respective setting.

The installations home in on the Times’s revelatory reporting in the city: startling allegations surrounding a Brooklyn homicide detective, inequality in public schools in the Bronx, “reckless lending” in the Manhattan taxi industry, the abandoned Staten Island subway project, and the tragedy of a young woman in Flushing, Queens, which was the focus of last year’s poignant investigation The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail. As part of the storefront takeovers, visitors will be able to use QR codes to access voice recordings of the reporters involved in the stories, who talk through their experiences and the challenges of bringing the news to light.

The experience campaign – which runs from now until June 24 – coincides with the release of a short film by Droga5 New York, which alludes to an investigation by the Times which exposed corruption in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Like others in The Truth Is Worth It series, the clip evokes similar visual motifs and the distinctive use of sound featured elsewhere in the parent campaign.

“Distinctive reporting on the New York region is core to the Times’s mission, especially at a time when local journalism across the country is at risk,” wrote The Times’s Clifford Levy in an associated article released as the campaign launched.

The Truth Is Local marks the first experiential effort from the New York Times, demonstrating its continued push for more memorable stunts that transcends traditional advertising – perhaps unexpected from a title so steeped in history. The campaign message seems to reiterate the publication’s commitment to leading the charge – in its creative endeavours as much as in its reporting.

nytimes.com; droga5.com; localprojects.com