Impact snapshot from a Press Forward grantee newsroom

Deirdre Conner, publisher and CEO of The Florida Trib

Who: Deirdre Conner, publisher and CEO of The Florida Trib

Where: Based in Jacksonville, but covering the entire state of Florida, thanks to recent expansion.

What: The Florida Trib, formerly known as The Tributary, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom founded in 2021 to fill critical news and information gaps in collaboration with partner news organizations. The Trib’s reporting has resulted in the resignation of a sheriff, a federal lawsuit that overturned racially gerrymandered city council districts, the halving of deaths at a local jail, and the dismantling of a program that wrongly issued thousands of tickets from school bus-mounted cameras. (The latter investigation was co-reported with the Miami Herald.)

Florida Trib website

The outlet originally covered Jacksonville, but expanded to cover all of Florida on February 1, 2026, with a new name and branding, and a team of nine folks distributed throughout the state. The Trib launched a new email newsletter, One Big Thing, focused on state affairs, and has plans for a podcast and voter guide coming later this year.

Why: The Trib’s mission is to shine a light on systemic problems and solutions, hold those in power accountable, and focus on undercovered topics through collaboration with other news organizations and the community. The need was acute for in-depth, investigative and government accountability reporting in Florida and research from Northwestern University found that Florida ranked 50th out of all states for news outlets per capita and didn’t have a non-partisan statewide nonprofit news outlet. Thus, the decision to expand to cover the entire state.

How: The newly expanded Florida Trib will make a deeper impact in the following ways:

• This year is an important election year in Florida and The Trib will create a special voter guide to help voters learn more about candidates and issues. Conner says it will contain basic information on voting, but also deeper backgrounds on candidates and original reporting not found elsewhere.
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  The Florida Trib staff includes (top row, left to right): Michael Vasquez, Nate Monroe, Nichole Manna, (middle row) Kate Payne, Deirdre Conner, Trinity Webster-Bass, (bottom row) Casey Frank, Ale’ta Turner, Liz Flaisig

• Also in the civic information realm, The Trib will create a “Citizen’s Guide” that will give Floridians a factual, non-partisan civic engagement tool that will help “bridge generational, ideological and technological divides,” according to Conner, distributed in formats that “meet people where they are.” The guide will include explainers that will help citizens decipher which elected officials are responsible for what decisions and how to contact them. It will be handy between elections.
• The Trib has had success with re-distribution of its stories to more than 100 news outlets, reaching more than 10 million people in Florida last year alone. They’ve also increased their impact with investigative collaborations with the Herald, Tampa Bay Times and ProPublica, and also launched the new Northeast Florida News Collaborative.
• Plus, they plan to pilot a statewide collaborative later this year thanks to seed funding from one supporter. “Collaboration is central to our theory of change,” Conner said.
  

  Quotable: “Press Forward’s grant has served as a springboard to where we are today. It has had a multiplier effect, helping us unlock a local challenge matching grant from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, as well as increasing our capacity and audience development. The grant has been transformative for The Trib.”