Florida

Billy Jean Louis

Award-winning journalist Billy Jean Louis is a senior editor and reporter for Miami Fourth Estate in Florida. He covered litigation for Bloomberg Law; diversity, equity, and inclusion for The Baltimore Sun; and health and education for The Baxter Bulletin before joining Report for America. His reporting on education has earned him prizes from the Virginia Press Association and Associated Press Media Editors. Jean Louis, a journalism graduate of the University of Florida, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He speaks French and Haitian Creole. He was first drawn to journalism during his youth in Haiti when he was exposed to the coup d’état of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At the time, the Haitian press didn’t act as a strong watchdog, inspiring Jean Louis to become a journalist to expose corruption in Haiti — and around the world.

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.

Rose Schnabel

Rose Schnabel covers agriculture, water, and climate in North Central Florida at WUFT News. Before joining Report for America, Schnabel worked as a bilingual AAAS Mass Media Fellow at El Nuevo Día in San Juan, Puerto Rico, covering science and the environment. She holds undergraduate degrees in biology and Spanish from Indiana University, where she completed an honors thesis on the rhetoric of science in the 1950s birth control trials in Puerto Rico. During her time at Indiana, Schnabel worked as a science writer for their College and led the online creative content team of their undergraduate academic journal.

Miami Fourth Estate

Miami Fourth Estate is a nonprofit, nonpartisan hyperlocal news organization focused on bringing strong news coverage to Miami’s neighborhoods and 34 municipalities. Our mission is to make sure that residents of every town get the information they need about local government, the environment, business, education and other pressing community issues and solutions. We also believe in developing the next generation of journalists and are partners with local educational institutions.

The Associated Press – Florida

The Associated Press is an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate and unbiased news in all formats and the essential provider of the technology and services vital to the news business. More than half the world’s population sees AP journalism every day.

WUFT News

WUFT News is a multiplatform, bilingual public media newsroom housed in the Innovation News Center at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications in Gainesville. In operation since 1958, our coverage today includes digital, TV and radio reporting across 16 counties in North Central Florida. Our mission is to inform and connect our diverse audiences and communities by producing excellent, multi-format news coverage across our region while nurturing the next generation of journalists.

Charlie McGee

Charlie McGee is an investigative reporter for The Tributary covering systemic problems in Jacksonville, Florida. He previously reported for the Victorville Daily Press in California’s High Desert with exclusive work prompting mass-action lawsuits against Goldman Sachs and Synagro over a sewage-pit fire, an FBI probe of alleged city-hall corruption, and policy changes across San Bernardino County. He has written for outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Rolling Stone magazine and Vice News on topics ranging from questionable COVID-19 spending to renewable-energy debates to CEO pay. He amassed research as assistant to former WSJ reporter Liz Hoffman for her 2023 book, “Crash Landing.” His work as investigations editor for The Daily Tar Heel sparked a campaign-finance investigation in North Carolina and the reversal of a $2.5 million deal between UNC-Chapel Hill and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. McGee has been recognized with honors including second-place in the California News Publishers Association’s 2021 Investigative Reporting competition and second-place in the Associated Collegiate Press’s 2020 Reporter of the Year competition.

Lillian M. Hernández Caraballo

Lillian (Lilly) Hernández Caraballo is a bilingual, multimedia journalist based in Central Florida, reporting for WMFE 90.7 in Orlando. Before joining Report for America, Caraballo was a writer, paginator and editor for the weekly periodical Hometown News and an associate producer for Spectrum News 13, a top 20 TV market. She graduated from University of Central Florida in 2021 with a bachelor's degree in journalism, a minor in writing and rhetoric and a certification in Hispanic media. At the school, Caraballo was editor-in-chief of NSM Today, the student newspaper, and interned with several news outlets, including WKMG News 6, WUCF 89.9 and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. During her time at WUCF, she collaborated to host, manage and web produce the award-winning project "The Road to Freedom Avenue: The Legacy of Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore." Her role in that project was instrumental in earning the organization a National Edward R. Murrow Award in 2022, for Excellence in Digital Reporting, among other accolades.

Reagan Ryan

Reagan Ryan covers climate change and the environment across Central Florida as a multimedia journalist for Spectrum News 13 in Orlando, Florida. She recently graduated from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, where she earned a master’s degree in investigative journalism. She’s covered public housing as a reporter at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and policing as a data and documentary journalist for the Carnegie-Knight News21 collegiate reporting initiative. She specializes in video and digital storytelling. She also holds a bachelor's degree in English from Florida State University, where she majored in editing, writing and media. Growing up in Daytona Beach, Florida, Creamer became interested in pursuing journalism by watching her local news stations, like News 13, cover hurricanes and storms.

The Tributary

The Tributary is a nonprofit newsroom focused on data-driven investigative reporting about entrenched problems like poverty, injustice and policy—critically important issues that have gone unsolved in Northeast Florida. Based in Jacksonville, The Tributary works to strengthen the area's news ecosystem, collaborating with existing outlets and working to engage the city's diverse communities to improve equity in access to, and demand for, responsive local news.