Florida

Will Brown

Will Brown is a journalist at WJCT Public Media in Jacksonville, Florida, and focuses on race, inequality and poverty. Prior to joining WJCT, he covered transportation, logistics and sports business at the Jacksonville Business Journal. Brown spent more than a decade as a sports reporter at The St. Augustine Record and the Tallahassee Democrat in Florida, and at the Victoria Advocate in Texas. His work has earned awards, including the Morris Journalism Excellence Award for social media, and honors from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors for his breaking sports news coverage. Brown holds a master’s degree in digital journalism and design from the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, photography and soccer.

Tampa Bay Times

The Tampa Bay Times is the largest newspaper in Florida, with an award-winning history of investigative, narrative and enterprise journalism. We have 126 journalists covering three counties and the state of Florida. That includes 63 reporters and 25 editors. Ambition runs deep. In the past six months, our reporters uncovered an intelligence-based policing program in nearby Pasco County meant to stop crime before it happened. As the pandemic took hold, we built a Scrapbook to capture what was happening to people’s lives, organizing dozens of contributions from readers. And we're two years into an astonishing story about black cemeteries across the Tampa Bay area that time and development forgot. The ownership structure is unique in journalism. The visionary owner, Nelson Poynter, bequeathed the newspaper to a school for journalists here in St. Petersburg, now known as the Poynter Institute, to protect our independence.

Spectrum News 13

Spectrum Networks brings hyperlocal content to audiences through multimedia and long-form journalism.

Sarasota Herald-Tribune

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune is a daily paper and news site providing local news to the residents of two growing counties on the west central Florida coast, Sarasota and Manatee. It has a history of high-impact local journalism normally seen at much larger papers, and a mission to equip readers with news and information. The Herald-Tribune's investigative journalism has won two Pulitzer Prizes.

WJCT

WJCT is a community-owned public media organization serving the Jacksonville region since 1958, using television, radio, digital media and live events to engage the community. Its mission is to improve the quality of lives and the community, by being a resource for people to come together to celebrate diversity, experience lifelong learning and actively engage in matters of civic importance.

WUSF Public Media

WUSF Public Media is committed to providing accurate, honest journalism that helps listeners understand the community and the world. WUSF is a service of the University of South Florida, providing news and music on two radio stations, seven websites and on social media. Since 1976, it’s been the flagship NPR affiliate, and covers 13 counties in west central Florida, including the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Sarasota.

Katie Hyson

Katie Hyson reports on racial justice for WUFT News, a public media newsroom in Gainesville, Florida. Before her Report for America position, Hyson worked as a supervising editor of digital content for WUFT. In 2020, she graduated from the professional master's program in mass communications at the University of Florida. Hyson focused on audio, visual and written narratives, resulting in her report on the first openly transgender person to run for the Florida Senate, and a story that focused on one woman in the months leading up to the closure of her homeless camp. Hyson, of Lutz, Florida, is obsessed with the powerful overlap of creative storytelling, rigorous journalism and multimedia. To that end, she developed and launched a two-course practicum in digital production and taught multimedia reporting at the University of Florida. When there's not a global pandemic, you can catch her telling stories onstage.

Rose Varela

Rose Monique Varela Henriquez reports for El Nuevo Herald in Miami, focusing on the Spanish-speaking immigrant communities of South Florida. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Varela Henriquez is a bilingual multimedia journalist with experience covering social justice issues and economic disparities. She interned at the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo in Puerto Rico, where her in-depth investigation uncovered how the island’s government halted a plan meant to assist homeless people during the pandemic. She also created data visualizations and carried out fact-checks on Puerto Rico’s governor candidate for the 2020 election. While working for Pulso Estudiantil, a student-run news site at the University of Puerto Rico, Varela Henriquez developed her photojournalism skills, and she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, magna cum laude, in 2020.

Rose Wong

Rose Wong covers health care and mental health for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. She interned for the paper in 2020, where she reported on breaking news, COVID-19 outbreaks in nursing homes and the pandemic's impact on service workers. As a cancer survivor, Wong has seen firsthand the complexities of life as a patient in the American health care system, thereby developing an interest in contributing clarity and justice through health journalism. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Duke University, where she was senior editor of The Chronicle, the student-run media organization. Her investigative series exposing a pattern of misdiagnoses and inadequate care within Duke Student Health earned her the Melcher Family Award for Excellence in Journalism's top honor, and her reporting became part of a national college health story published by The Washington Post. Home for Wong is Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Anna Jean Kaiser

Anna Jean Kaiser reports on economic mobility in Miami-Dade County for the Miami Herald. A recipient of an Overseas Press Club scholarship, Kaiser will earn her master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2021. But before all of this, Kaiser, who is from the San Francisco Bay Area, graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, then moved to Brazil speaking only some Portuguese and having no journalism experience. Kaiser soon found herself fluent in the language and reporting for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and The Guardian, covering the Zika virus, President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, the Summer Olympics and the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, among other stories. This multimedia journalist speaks Portuguese and Spanish, and in 2018 she made several trips to the Venezuelan border to report on the migration crisis and the Venezuelan diaspora, which inspired her to expand her beat beyond Brazil and report throughout the Americas.