Florida

WUFT News

WUFT News is a multiplatform, bilingual student-driven public media newsroom, housed in the Innovation News Center at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, and based in Gainesville. It began as WUFT-TV (a PBS affiliate), first airing in 1958, followed by WUFT-FM (an NPR affiliate) in 1981. In 2012, the TV, radio and digital news operations converged into one newsroom to cover north central Florida. The newsroom focuses on a 13-county area.

Molly Duerig

Molly Duerig reports for Spectrum News 13, a cable news television channel in Central Florida, where she focuses on the region’s housing crisis. Duerig is a multimedia journalist with a background in video production. While pursuing her master’s degree from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, she covered local breaking news for The Arizona Republic and traveled to Peru to report on the impacts of mass migration of Venezuelan children and families. She also reported on U.S. natural disaster recovery and response as a Hearst Foundation Fellow with News21, directing a 26-minute documentary episode about flooding across the U.S. that was part of the EPPY award winning documentary series “State of Emergency.” Originally from Pittsburgh, Duerig previously worked in the nonprofit sector as a youth media educator and program manager. Her work has won recognition from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Society of Professional Journalists, Editor & Publisher Magazine and the Broadcast Education Association.

Bailey LeFever

Bailey LeFever reports for the Tampa Bay Times where she focuses on senior citizens who are often overlooked by the media. LeFever examines everything from health care to culture, government policy to family dynamics. Most recently, LeFever covered local government at the Miami Herald, where she wrote stories on the ways the coronavirus has challenged elders and minority groups in the city. Previously she interned at the Palm Beach Post, both on the breaking news and the community teams. Over the past few years, LeFever has traveled to Cuba to cover the illegal Hawksbill sea turtle trade, reported from a canoe on the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, and hung out with tennis star Coco Gauff at teen phenom’s family’s sports bar. She has also photographed NCAA baseball and softball playoffs for the University of Florida Athletic Association. LeFever studied journalism and history at the University of Florida. While in college, she wrote for the local NPR station, WUFT News and interned at the Gainesville Sun. She was also managing editor of her college newspaper, the Independent Florida Alligator. LeFever grew up in Ocala, Florida.

Yadira Lopez

Yadira Lopez covers economic mobility for The Miami Herald. She’s part of a team effort to examine how the Miami-Dade area has shifted from a place where a middle income provided a comfortable life for hundreds of thousands to a metropolis beset by a housing crisis and severe inequality. Lopez has covered Latino issues for the Malheur Enterprise in Vale, Oregon, as a member of Report for America. She previously worked at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida and was editor at the Catalyst, the student paper at New College of Florida, where she received her undergraduate degree. She has worked as an English language assistant in France. Born in Santa Clara, Cuba, she grew up in Miami, Florida.

Syra Ortiz-Blanes

Syra Ortiz-Blanes covers Latin America and the Caribbean, and its many connections to Florida, for El Nuevo Herald in Miami. Ortiz-Blanes, a Puerto Rican journalist with a background in print and radio, covered hurricane evacuees in Philadelphia through a multimedia series she created on her own called “Las Voces de María” (The Voices of Maria), which raised thousands of dollars and secured housing for a displaced family and resources for hurricane survivors. Since then, Ortiz-Blanes has reported on Latinos in the U.S. and beyond. She graduates from the Columbia Journalism School in May 2020. During her time there, she spent a month in Puerto Rico covering gender violence in the wake of the 2020 earthquakes. Before Columbia, Ortiz-Blanes was the podcast coordinator and assistant editor for The Philadelphia Citizen, a solutions journalism media outlet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Documented NY, WHYY (NPR), and others. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania magna cum laude and was selected as a Kelly Writer’s House Junior Fellow.

El Nuevo Herald

El Nuevo Herald is the second largest Spanish-language news outlet in the United States, covering local, national and international news for more than three decades, striving to be the most credible and dynamic source of news and information by producing journalism that makes a difference. El Nuevo Herald publishes in Spanish but also is routinely published in English in the Miami Herald. El Nuevo Herald shares a newsroom with the Miami Herald and they collaborate on a daily basis. Occasionally, the newspaper also collaborates with WLRN, an NPR affiliate that operates out of our newsroom. The newspaper’s coverage area extends well beyond the local community, reaching an audience of more than 357,000 in print and 3.9 million online. El Nuevo Herald’s digital readers stretch across South Florida, the Caribbean and Latin America.

Tampa Bay Times

The Tampa Bay Times is the largest newspaper in Florida, with a rich, award-winning history of investigative, narrative and enterprise journalism. We have 150 journalists covering four counties and the state of Florida. That includes reporters and editors across news, investigations, enterprise, features, sports and digital. Ambition runs deep for us. In the past year alone, our reporters uncovered a pattern at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, where children were dying at an alarming rate inside the hospital’s heart institute. Our reporters also found a cemetery in Tampa for black men, women and children that time and development forgot. Residents living in buildings on top of that lost cemetery are being relocated and a community is trying to heal. Our ownership structure is unique in journalism, preserved by our late visionary owner, Nelson Poynter. He bequeathed the newspaper to a school for journalists here in St. Petersburg, now known as the Poynter Institute, to protect our independence. We take that independence very seriously, focusing our resources on distinct, exceptional reporting. Our mission as a news organization traces back to our founding in 1884: to report the truth and contribute to an informed society. That mission depends on maintaining our credibility within the community. Poynter said it best in 1961: “When we turn to history we can draw inspiration from those who risked their necks and their economic lives to keep the free press free. Every year newspapers are cited for Pulitzer prizes and other awards in recognition of spectacular crusades and courage. But we have an even greater daily triumph of American journalism in helping to fulfill less spectacular but imperative needs. Without these self-government cannot endure.”

Spectrum News 13

Spectrum News 13 is a 24-hour news station based in Orlando engaging communities around central Florida. We bring compelling and valuable hyperlocal content, including news, politics, weather, and traffic to our audiences through high-quality multimedia journalism. We break local TV news traditions and go beyond crime-chasing to create long-form stories with innovative technology and journalistic approaches. Our newsroom serves the Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford metropolitan area, producing about 8 hours of live news and 16 hours of recorded content, daily.

Miami Herald

The Miami Herald is a regional news organization that focuses its coverage on South Florida and the surrounding region of the Caribbean and Latin America, to which most of its residents have ties. It's one of the most diverse areas of the country. The largest county in our market, MIami-Dade, has a population that is more than 65 percent foreign born. The Herald has a strong tradition of accountability journalism, and has won more Pulitzer Prizes (22) than any news organization in the Southeast United States

Lautaro Grinspan

Lautaro has been an editorial fellow for Washingtonian magazine, where he reported on the city’s Hispanic and immigrant communities, authoring Washingtonian’s first Spanish-language stories. Previously he interned at NPR (Weekend Edition) and WBUR in Boston. He also worked as an engagement manager at Vox.com and a digital attache aide and trade assistant at the U.S. Department of Commerce. As a student at Northeastern University, he was a college correspondent for USA Today.