Meet the student journalists who report on Florida’s most influential and powerful elected officials

Silas Morgan, 22, the son of Walmart employees and a first-generation college student, had a big decision to make.

Morgan was part of a University of Florida investigative team investigating the state’s most influential and powerful elected officials.

A few weeks earlier, after Morgan combed through campaign records, financial reports, property lists and voter registration records, he reported that state Rep. Bruce Antone, D-Orlando, had listed his home on official documents in District 40, not District 41, where he was elected to serve.

“The discovery raises questions about whether Antone, a seven-time state House representative, was legally eligible to hold office,” Morgan wrote in his April article, which highlighted residency rules for candidates and incumbents in the Florida state House of Representatives.

Antone was supposed to live in the district he was running in at the time of the election and reside there for the duration of his term, Morgan reported. But in a campaign filing for the 2022 election, Antone listed his address as a home in District 40 — the wrong district. Then his campaign said Antone’s wife lived in a different home in District 40.

“Antone said the two were still legally married but had been separated on and off for years, and he sometimes still lived with her,” Morgan reported.

The day after Morgan confronted Antone with his findings, the state lawmaker changed his address back to District 41. Antone now said he lives in an apartment with a 72-year-old district aide on his legislative staff.

“We laughed to ourselves, and then we said to Silas, ‘You need to call and find out why he did this.’ And he called back, and to his credit, Antone was very candid,” said Ted Bridis, a former editor of a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team at The Associated Press who now teaches a new generation of journalists how to interview politicians and sift through public records.

Antone said he “forgot to update his voting records to reflect what he had stated was his new residential address,” according to Morgan’s article. “He confirmed that he changed it because of the reporter’s request.”

Morgan and the other student journalists at Bridis distribute stories through the UF-run news service Fresh Take Florida, which shares its content for free with about 100 media outlets, including CNN, the Associated Press, Gannett and the Tribune. (Donors help keep Fresh Take Florida operating in perpetuity within the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications.)

These UF investigations come at a time when understaffed professional newsrooms often struggle to vet candidates and delve deeper into their knowledge. In an election year and a demanding news cycle, some outlets turn politics into a horse race or miss candidates’ red flags.

Works like those of Silas Morgan — whom Bridis calls “a bulldog” — aim to fill the gaps with thoughtful, in-depth coverage.

The stories from Fresh Take Florida students are classic journalism, reporting at its best. They follow the money. They take the time to read mortgage documents and other public records. They scrutinize what public officials say to hold them accountable.

“They’re serious. They know what they’re doing and, frankly, they’re doing the kind of thorough work that we should all be doing,” Bridis said. “Shame on us professionals for not following this stuff.”

But, perhaps inspired by their name, Fresh Take students sometimes come up with new takes on classic journalism. To generate story ideas and facilitate fact-checking, Fresh Take Florida created an internal website to mine public records. It’s a goldmine for finding officials’ phone numbers — Florida’s version of LexisNexis, as Bridis described it.

The password-protected website, called Florida Data, provides access to five years of voter registration records, land records, traffic tickets, car accident reports and hunting and fishing licenses. The website creates automatic alerts, as in Antone’s case, when the address listed by elected officials doesn’t match their district boundaries.

Fresh Take Florida already offers free access to the site to major media outlets, such as the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald. Starting this month, the news service will share it with all media outlets that publish its stories, Bridis said.

“If it’s a small weekly newspaper in Okeechobee, you might not be able to afford LexisNexis accounts for your entire staff, but we can almost get you there,” Bridis said.

Fresh Take Florida’s article on Bruce Antone has raised further doubts about his residency claims.

UF students knocked on doors and spoke with the assistant’s neighbor Anton claimed to live with. She said she had never seen a man living in the apartment.

Meanwhile, Antone continued to receive mail at her property outside the district, according to state campaign filings.

“Where does Antone live in Central Florida, relative to where he ran for office during his long legislative career? For more than a decade, it’s been difficult to know for sure,” Morgan wrote.

Last month, Morgan published an exclusive article in the Orlando Sentinel. Antone’s Democratic primary rival filed an ethics complaint against him because of residency issues raised in Morgan’s Fresh Take Florida article.

And Antone wasn’t the only Florida lawmaker who lived outside his district, Morgan found.

Once again, Morgan consulted public records and read mortgage documents while reporting on a Republican candidate in Miami running for House District 118 in a special election last year.

Michael David Redondo said he signed a 12-month lease on an apartment and updated his voter records with his new address in June 2023. But just days earlier, Redondo “purchased a $950,000 two-bedroom luxury waterfront condominium 20 miles away in House District 113,” according to Morgan’s story.

Redondo agreed to live in the condo as his primary residence for at least one year, according to the mortgage terms he signed.

Morgan confronted Redondo, who works as a lawyer, to ask if he was violating the contract by living in the apartment.

“Not to my knowledge,” Redondo said.

The Miami Herald published the Fresh Take Florida article in December after Redondo narrowly won the special election.

The headline read: “Newly elected Florida lawmaker has new waterfront condo. It’s not in his district.”

Redondo’s Democratic rival has now filed a lawsuit and asked the courts to remove Redondo from office. Redondo wants the lawsuit dismissed and has filed for re-election, Morgan reported.

When Fresh Take Florida launched in 2019, Bridis envisioned her students covering Tallahassee for media outlets that were shedding legislative coverage to save money.

Since then, stories have evolved beyond the state capital.

His students chartered a helicopter to assess hurricane damage in the Big Bend coastal region. Three students traveled to the Bahamas for a week to cover relief efforts after Hurricane Maria.

Sometimes they break big stories, like a Gainesville hospital that closed operating rooms because of contaminated instruments, or an entrepreneur with a shady past who tried to get state funding to develop new digital license plates in Florida. (The Kansas used-car dealer threatened to sue the news organization if the students didn’t retract the story. Fresh Take Florida refused to do so and eventually backed down, Bridis said.)

When Gov. Ron DeSantis bragged that the state had hired a dozen police officers from New York City, the news organization dug into their backgrounds. Some of their pasts were unsavory, like that of a Walmart security guard who had been fired, and another who was one of several undercover NYPD officers involved in a federal trial for handcuffing and brutally beating a man.

UF students often find themselves telling big stories for the first time in what will be busy journalism careers.

UF student Karina Elwood had never set foot in a courthouse before she went to the federal appeals court in Atlanta for oral arguments in the legal fight to give former inmates the right to vote after voters approved a ballot initiative in 2018. Elwood remembers walking into the courtroom and feeling stripped down to boots because she didn’t own dress shoes as a student.

“It was one of the best internships I had in college,” said Elwood, now a 25-year-old education reporter for The Washington Post. Elwood learned how to report on the political process and how state laws were made for her Fresh Take Florida stories.

Fresh Take Florida graduates have gone on to work at The New York Times, USA Today, The Tampa Bay Times and The Chicago Tribune.

Morgan graduated in May and was hired as a reporter at the Orlando Sentinel, his hometown newspaper. The Sentinel had already published Morgan’s investigation into Antone while he was still in college.

Bridis’ students don’t hesitate to call the governor’s office or corner a lawmaker outside a committee. But they continue to learn in the classroom.

Bridis carefully reviews his students’ articles and reviews the files with them. The stakes are high. Bridis says he knows he could be one correction away from closing. Even though Fresh Take Florida is the teaching hospital of journalism, there’s no room for serious errors in stories that appear in the state’s most widely read newspapers.

“We have the enthusiasm, the energy and the zeal. And (Bridis) has the wisdom,” Morgan said. “He teaches us how to think and what to look for, so that when we graduate, we can do it for ourselves.”

Editor’s note: Gabrielle Russon is a freelance journalist in Orlando. She worked at the Orlando Sentinel from 2014 to 2021.