Collier Prize Showcase

The Collier Prize, the leading U.S. journalism competition for state government reporting, is presenting a showcase Feb. 13 from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. that will highlight the latest tools and trends to help journalists hold institutions accountable in all 50 states.

The showcase will take place both in-person at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications and online via livestream (link will be emailed 1-week prior). Lunch will be provided to those attending in person.

This event will feature journalists from the Texas Tribune and ProPublica. They will be sharing how they reported their 2024 Collier Prize winning project and speak on the latest tools being developed to help journalists access public records and spot trends in your state.

Speakers:

Lexi Churchill is a research reporter for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative. Before joining ProPublica, Lexi interned at CNBC, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Columbia Daily Tribune, and KCUR 89.3, Kansas City’s NPR affiliate. Her reporting on the University of Missouri’s Title IX appeals process won the GateHouse Public Service Award for 2018. Lexi graduated from Mizzou in 2019 with a degree in investigative convergence journalism.

Zach Despart is a politics reporter for The Texas Tribune. He investigates power — who wields it, how and to what ends — through the lens of Texas government. He has extensively covered the Uvalde school shooting, including a groundbreaking investigation on the role the gunman’s rifle played in the disastrous police response. He previously covered Harris County for the Houston Chronicle, where he reported on corruption, elections, disaster preparedness and the region’s recovery from Hurricane Harvey. An upstate New York native, he received his bachelor’s degree in political science and film from the University of Vermont.

Lomi Kriel is a reporter with the ProPublica-Texas Tribune investigative unit. Previously she was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle covering immigration, often focused on the Texas border. Six months before the Trump administration announced its family separation policy, Kriel uncovered how the government was secretly using the prosecution of illegal entry to detain parents until deportation and send children to federal shelters. Her stories resulted in the release of one mother and helped spur a pivotal American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit largely ending the practice. She received the 2019 George Polk Award for national reporting, in part for her continued work on family separations. Kriel, who was born and raised in South Africa, immigrated to the United States in 1998. She has also worked as a Central American correspondent for Thomson Reuters and a criminal justice reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University and speaks Afrikaans and Spanish.

Neil Chase is the chief executive officer of CalMatters. He was previously executive editor of The Mercury News and East Bay Times, where his team won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Coverage. Neil worked as an editor at The San Francisco Examiner, The Arizona Republic, CBS MarketWatch and The New York Times and was an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

David Cuillier, Ph.D., is director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project, and co-director of the Brechner Center for Advancement of the First Amendment, at the University of Florida. Before joining the University of Florida in July 2023, Cuillier taught access to public records, data journalism, and other courses at the University of Arizona School of Journalism for 17 years, where he also served as director of the school and director of graduate studies. He served as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2013-14, as well as SPJ FOI chair for five years, was president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition 2019-2023 and served as head of the Communication Law & Policy Division for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

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