Kate Payne
Kate Payne covers government and politics for The Associated Press with a focus on the Florida Legislature and education. Before joining Report for America, Payne covered education for WLRN Public Media in South Florida, where she profiled students and pressed officials in some of the country’s largest school districts. Payne has spent her career in public media newsrooms in Florida and Iowa, where her reporting has spanned interviewing middle schoolers on the lunch line to presidential candidates on the campaign trail. In 2020, she and NPR’s Miles Parks broke the story that Iowa Democrats planned to use an untested and potentially vulnerable app to transmit their Caucus results. Payne has won awards for her political reporting, feature writing and sound editing, and has reported from the field in the aftermath of multiple natural disasters. Like a good Floridian, Payne has a love for the weird and the wild and makes an excellent Key lime pie.
