ABOUT US

Diane Rado has covered state and local government and public schools in six states over some 30 years, focusing on policy and investigative stories as well as legislative and political reporting. She spent most of her career at the St. Petersburg (Tampa Bay) Times and the Chicago Tribune. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and did a fellowship in education reform at the University of Michigan in 1999-2000. She is married to a journalist and has three adult children.

Michael Moline has covered politics and the legal system for more than 30 years. He is a former managing editor of the San Francisco Daily Journal and former assistant managing editor of The National Law Journal. He began his career covering the Florida Capitol for United Press International. More recently, he wrote for Florida Politics.

Mitch Perry is a St. Petersburg-based journalist. He’s worked in TV, radio, print and online journalism, and brings more than two decades of experience covering politics and government in Florida. A San Francisco native, he began his reporting career as a reporter-anchor at KPFA Radio in Berkeley. He was most recently the politics reporter at Spectrum Bay News 9 in the Tampa Bay area. He’s also worked at Florida Politics, Creative Loafing and WMNF Radio in Tampa.

Jackie Llanos is a reporter for Florida Phoenix. She is a recent graduate of the University of Richmond, where she studied journalism and anthropology. Jackie grew up in Colombia before making Virginia her home for a decade. Her dedication to nonprofit and public journalism has led her to intern at Nashville Public Radio, Virginia Public Media and States Newsroom affiliate Virginia Mercury. She has covered education and marihuana legislation as well as local, state and national elections.

Christian is a graduate from the University of Florida and Valencia College. At Valencia, he was the Editor-in-chief of the Valencia Voice. At UF, he worked as a reporter and editor with the Independent Florida Alligator's University desk. He has interned at Orlando Weekly and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books, most recently Dream State, an historical memoir of her Florida family, and Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. She lives in Tallahassee, except for the times she runs off to Great Britain, desperate for a different government to satirize.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Lucy Morgan was chief of the St. Petersburg (Tampa Bay) Times capital bureau in Tallahassee for 20 years, retiring in 2006 and serving as senior correspondent until 2013. She was inducted into the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame and the Florida Newspaper Hall of Fame. The Florida Senate named its press gallery after Morgan, in honor of her two decades covering the Legislature.

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller Oh, Florida! How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, which won a gold medal from the Florida Book Awards. His latest, published in January, is Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther. The Florida Heritage Book Festival recently named him a Florida Literary Legend. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.