Suncoast Searchlight wins Florida Press Club honors

Journalists at Suncoast Searchlight were honored with six awards from the Florida Press Club for education, business, environmental coverage and in-depth reporting.

The statewide awards were presented Saturday evening during a ceremony in West Palm Beach. They are the first media honors for Suncoast Searchlight since the nonprofit newsroom’s official launch in February 2025. The awards honored work produced in Florida and published between June 1, 2024 and May 31, 2025.

Suncoast Searchlight investigative reporter Alice Herman took first place in the Class B education category for stories that focused on New College of Florida, including an article about a Chinese professor fired under a controversial state law that limits public universities from employing people from so-called “countries of concern.”

Read the story: New College fires Chinese professor under controversial Florida ‘countries of concern’ law

Journalists at Suncoast Searchlight were honored with six awards from the Florida Press Club for education, business, environmental coverage and in-depth reporting. | Photo by Josh Salman, Suncoast Searchlight

Investigative Editor Josh Salman and former data reporter Kara Newhouse also won first place in the Class B business journalism category for their stories on Florida’s greenbelt law. The series revealed how the state loophole is costing Sarasota and Manatee counties millions in lost revenue by allowing developers to tap a decades-old law meant to preserve agriculture and shrink the taxes on pastures they intend to pave over.

Read the investigation: Sarasota, Bradenton developers score big tax breaks with “Rent-A-Cow” loophole

“I’m incredibly proud of the work produced by our team,” said Emily Le Coz, Suncoast Searchlight’s executive editor-in-chief. “What makes these honors especially meaningful is that all of this work was done within our first few months of publishing. It reinforces why we launched Suncoast Searchlight — to deliver ambitious, deeply-reported journalism on the issues shaping people’s lives across our region.”

Suncoast Searchlight also was awarded second and third-place honors in the annual competition for work on environmental coverage, general news, in-depth reporting and public service journalism.

Among those honors, Salman took second place in Class B environmental coverage for stories on the region’s sewage spills. And Salman and investigative reporter Derek Gilliam took second place for Lucy Morgan Award for In-Depth Reporting and third place for the Frances DeVore Award for Public Service for Power and Profit, a series examining special government districts.

Those stories exposed how real estate developers are reshaping Florida’s housing market through the unchecked proliferation of independent special districts — governmental entities they create and control. 

Read the investigation: Power and profit: Developers gained government status, then got bonds to build big

Suncoast Searchlight is a 501c3 nonprofit news organization whose mission is to produce investigative and explanatory journalism that serves and empowers the residents of Florida’s Suncoast region, including Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. The newsroom produces original content, partners with other local news outlets and offers support, like editing and data analysis, to other local journalists.