ORLANDO, Fla. – A new state law restricting individuals from sleeping on public property is shaking up communities across Florida but has also inspired an unprecedented journalism collaboration uniting 10 news outlets to tell the complex stories behind the issue.
Recounting how the idea got off the ground, Judith Smelser, president and general manager of Central Florida Public Media, asked a simple question: “Could we get local news leaders in a room together to talk about what are our common challenges?”
Smelser first called her friend Megan Stokes at the Oviedo Community News. The two then brought in Mark Brewer from the Community Foundation. Within a few months, what began with a simple question and a couple of phone calls grew into a news collaborative – the first for the region, bringing together WKMG-TV, the Orlando Sentinel, Central Florida Public Media, WUCF, Lakeland’s LKLDNow, the Osceola News Gazette, the Oviedo Community News, Orlando’s The Community Paper, Winter Garden’s Vox Populi, and the Winter Park Voice.
“I’ve been in Central Florida for 30-something years, and this is the first time I’ve seen something like this,” said Roger Simmons, executive editor of the Orlando Sentinel. “If you told me years ago that I’d be sharing my stories with News 6 or Central Florida Public Media, I’d have said you were crazy.”
[EXCLUSIVE: Become a News 6 Insider (it’s FREE) | PINIT! Share your photos]
“The local news industry is changing by leaps and bounds, day in and day out,” said Allison McGinley, news director at WKMG News 6. “Good journalism is about transparency, authenticity, and deep community engagement. This collaboration allows us to combine resources and dig deeper into the root causes.”
“We know that Channel 6 has certain viewers, the Sentinel has certain readers, and Central Florida Public Media has certain listeners,” added Simmons. “They may not intersect, so this is a way for us to get our stories, your stories, stories from all organizations, out to a broader audience.”
As part of the news collaborative, each outlet will contribute its unique vision and storytelling – whether it’s hyper-local coverage, investigative reporting, or multimedia content creation – to paint a comprehensive picture of a single topic over a six-month period. The chosen focus of the collaborative’s pilot project is homelessness, particularly the enforcement of the new law banning public camping.
But putting competition aside and collaboration front and center goes against the competitive grain of local journalism.
“When you’re looking to do good work, you recognize that you have to put competition on the cutting room floor, and the focus has to be on our audience, on our community,” said McGinley.
“Times have changed, and the competition isn’t (with) each other anymore,” said Simmons. “It’s misinformation, social media influencers, and the erosion of trust in journalism.”
“We’re in a time right now when information is everywhere. Facts are scarce,” said Smelser. “We’re in a time when we can go online and find things that masquerade as news, masquerade as facts. And a lot of people legitimately don’t know how to tell the difference because they look the same.”
McGinley, Simmons, Smelser, as well as many other local news managers around the country, are all on the right track. Their suspicions are backed up in research from the Pew Research Center. Pew’s recent study, published in November of 2024, brought to light several eye-opening trends about social media influencers and those who consume their content:
- 1-in-5 Americans said they regularly get their news from social media influencers.
- 2 out of 3 people also said news influencers helped them better understand a topic.
- 77% of so-called news influencers have either no affiliation with a news organization or any sort of journalism background.
Over the past decade, local journalism, while focusing exclusively on competition from other like-minded outlets, was flanked by an enemy in plain sight. What was once their audience, broke away and morphed into their biggest competitor.
“The fracturing of our audience, the ability for anybody with a camera or a microphone to have a platform, doesn’t necessarily make them an expert or somebody who is qualified for the community to listen to,” said McGinley. “I think that the definition of what news is has gotten muddied over the years.”
“The fact of the matter is that there’s a difference between someone who is on their own posting on social media and a professional journalist who adheres to a code of ethics, who has a whole editorial structure behind them,” adds Smelser. “That’s fact checking, that’s looking for holes in their stories. You know, that’s making sure that what we put out is reliable.”
McGinley also adds that cable news hasn’t done local journalism any favors by discarding news in favor of low-hanging-fruit talking heads and opinions.
“There was a point in the late 80s, early 90s, where cable news became a thing. Many of us watched war unfolding on 24-hour television. But now that has morphed into what I call cable news entertainment because it is truly either partisan or opinionated information,” she said. “There are a number of individuals across our communities and across our country that think that is unbiased information and news. And it’s not. It is opinion.”
The journalists involved in the collaborative are well aware of the potential challenges ahead in covering Florida’s new homeless law.
“This is a topic, a story that well, it’s not just a story,” said Smelser. “The impact of this, of this law, is going to be far-reaching and wide-ranging.”
“The law puts law enforcement, citizens, and the homeless in a tough spot,” said Simmons. “It’s not just about enforcing rules — it’s about finding real solutions that address the root causes of homelessness.”
Simmons added: “Homelessness isn’t a one-size-fits-all issue. Each individual has a different story, and our job as journalists is to help the community understand those stories and the larger systemic challenges at play.”
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily: