Northeast Florida newsrooms join statewide election reporting partnership

Four Northeast Florida news organizations have joined a statewide coalition to expand coverage of local elections in a region where many races typically go unreported. Jacksonville Today, the Northeast Florida News Collaborative, and WJXT News4Jax are among 27 newsrooms and university journalism programs launching the Florida Election Reporting Partnership, which will provide free coverage of the August 18 primary and focus initially on school board elections.

The collaboration, organized by The Florida Trib, responds to what organizers call the nation's largest local news gap in Florida, which ranks last nationally in media outlets per capita. During the 2024 school board elections, more than one-third of Florida's 67 counties — including several in Northeast Florida — had no reporting despite contested races. Where coverage existed, more than a third of stories were basic candidate questionnaires, and most were behind paywalls.

What's happening

The Florida Election Reporting Partnership officially launched July 13, 2026, with coverage beginning for the August 18 primary election. The collaboration includes the University of Florida, WFSU's Rural News Service, the Miami Herald, the Orlando Sentinel, Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, and multiple television stations and NPR member stations across the state.

Florida voters will see 209 school board races in 2026, with nearly 40 percent of those seats already having only one candidate on the ballot. The partnership will provide nonpartisan coverage that includes candidate backgrounding, campaign finance reporting, and contextual information beyond questionnaires.

The collaborative's reporting is guided by a custom dashboard built by the University of Florida that draws public candidate data from the Florida Division of Elections and county supervisor of elections websites. Professional journalists and trained journalism students will work together to produce stories that will be made available free to voters statewide through the partnership's website at floridaelections.org.

In Northeast Florida, the partnership includes Jacksonville Today, the Northeast Florida News Collaborative, and WJXT News4Jax. These organizations will contribute to coverage of school board races in Duval, St. Johns, Clay, Nassau, Baker, Putnam, and Flagler counties.

Why school board elections matter here

School board elections carry particular weight in Northeast Florida, where district decisions affect hundreds of thousands of students and billions in public funding. Duval County Public Schools, the state's sixth-largest district, serves approximately 127,000 students with an operating budget exceeding $2 billion annually. St. Johns County Schools, one of Florida's fastest-growing districts, consistently ranks among the state's top performers but faces capacity pressures as the county's population continues to climb.

The partnership's focus on school boards reflects both their fiscal scale and their direct impact on families. School boards make binding decisions on curriculum, discipline policies, facility construction, teacher salaries, and property-tax millage rates. In Clay County, for example, the school board recently navigated contentious debates over school resource officers and facility needs driven by residential growth along the First Coast Expressway corridor. In Nassau County, board decisions shape how Wildlight and other master-planned communities will be served by new schools.

The collaboration also responds to Florida's recent ranking as having the nation's lowest reading scores among its more than 2.8 million students, according to an Education Scorecard report cited by the partnership. Those academic outcomes make board composition and policy direction consequential for parents evaluating whether to move to or remain in Northeast Florida's various school districts — a calculation that directly affects home values and development patterns in a region where school quality is a primary driver of residential location decisions.

Addressing the local news gap

Florida's ranking as the state with the largest local news gap per capita has tangible effects in Northeast Florida. During the 2024 school board election cycle, multiple counties in the region had contested races that received little or no coverage from traditional news outlets. Voters in those areas often turned to unverified social media posts, candidate-controlled websites, or word-of-mouth for information about races that would determine who controls district budgets, hiring, and policy for the next four years.

The paywall issue is particularly acute in Northeast Florida. The Florida Times-Union, the region's legacy daily newspaper, operates behind a subscription wall, as do most commercial news websites. Free sources of local political coverage have been limited primarily to occasional television news segments and nonprofit outlets with narrow geographic focus. For voters in Baker, Putnam, or Nassau counties, comprehensive election coverage has been especially scarce.

The partnership aims to change that dynamic by making all school board election stories freely accessible. Readers anywhere in Northeast Florida will be able to visit floridaelections.org to find reporting on their local races without encountering subscription prompts or paywalls. The model relies on collaborative production — sharing reporting costs across multiple newsrooms and universities — to make broad coverage economically viable.

Training the next generation

A core component of the partnership involves journalism students from the University of Florida, Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, and Florida International University working alongside professional journalists. Students receive training in professional reporting standards, backgrounding techniques, campaign finance analysis, and objective information gathering before contributing stories to the collaborative.

Wesley Wright, assistant director of Student Media at Florida Atlantic University, said the collaboration allows his students "to learn about other parts of the state they aren't familiar with, but also how candidates understand the myriad state and federal issues that impact their lives and the lives of children in their district." He added that students "will not only become better reporters, but they will also be more engaged citizens in general, having learned how this stuff works."

Amy Tardif, WUSF Editorial Manager, emphasized the public-radio mission component: "Part of WUSF's and public radio's mission is to inform our communities about civic issues. This provides real-world experience for the next generation of journalists working alongside professionals and with me, a professional editor."

The student-journalist model addresses two challenges simultaneously: it expands coverage capacity beyond what legacy newsrooms can afford on their own, and it trains a pipeline of reporters who understand how to cover local government and elections — skills that have atrophied as local news employment has declined nationwide.

What happens next

The partnership's first major deliverable will be school board election coverage for the August 18, 2026, primary. Stories will be published on floridaelections.org and distributed to partner organizations for republication on their own platforms. Voters can visit the website to find candidate profiles, campaign finance reports, and contextual reporting on the issues facing their local school districts.

The collaboration has not announced whether it will expand beyond school board races to cover other down-ballot contests, such as county commission, soil and water conservation district, or municipal elections in future cycles. The August primary will serve as a proof of concept for the model's viability and reach.

For Northeast Florida residents looking for information on their local school board candidates, the partnership represents the most comprehensive free election coverage the region has seen in recent cycles. Voters in counties that have historically gone without any reporting on board races will have access to the same depth of information as those in metropolitan areas served by multiple newsrooms.

The initiative arrives as Northeast Florida continues its rapid growth trajectory, with new residents moving into St. Johns, Clay, and Nassau counties at rates that strain school capacity and make board decisions about facility planning and funding especially consequential. In a region where school quality shapes housing markets and families' decisions about where to live, access to reliable information about who will govern those schools has direct implications for community outcomes and development patterns across the seven-county area.