The decline in local journalism is having an insidious impact on democracy: diminished government accountability, reduced access to accurate information, and a decline in public trust. In this Nieman Reports piece, I explain how I've watched it play out in Tallahassee -- and how it's not unique to Florida.

Florida's new secretary of the Department of Corrections has a sober warning: Florida prisons are on the brink of collapse. They cannot sustain the understaffed, inexperienced crew of corrections officers in command of a penal system stripped of educational programs and housed in crumbling facilities. As I explain, years of budget cuts and legislative indifference have led to this problem.

A secretive organization with the goal of thwarting amendments approved by voters after the 2020 election cycle has spent more than $800,000 on paid petition gatherers in the last four months, using funds from undisclosed sources and raising the specter of another high stakes fight over the future of energy regulation in Florida. The organization calls itself Keep Our Constitution Clean and says its purpose is to keep the state’s premier legal document uncluttered by special interest measures.

Two mass shootings that left 31 dead and renewed a national call for better attention to the warning signs of homegrown terrorism have revived the debate in Florida’s Capitol over how to curb gun violence. Stirring the debate is Senate President Bill Galvano, the Bradenton Republican who this week sent signals he is prepared to use political capital to pass gun legislation in an election year.

As a new law took effect July 7, declaring that petition signatures are invalid if they are not certified within 30 days, Citizen Voters unloaded hundreds of thousands of petitions to elections offices. They’re calling it the “big dump” — and some are asking if it was an intentional ploy to sabotage liberal-leaning amendments.

After quashing an Orlando-Tampa rail line 8 years ago, Gov. Rick Scott has steered tax money and favorable regulations to the privately run company that wants to replace it. He and his wife have investments in the lending division of All Aboard Florida’s parent company.

Gov. Rick Scott is a wealthy guy who shields his assets in a blind trust, but his net worth increased 55 percent in one year and we wanted to know why. The investigation was revealing.

I anchored a deep look into how sex has been used as a tool and a weapon for the politically powerful in Florida’s capital city.

After the school killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, a small group of key legislators visited the scene. What they saw was life changing, they said. Here's my story.

The woman whose story proved to be pivotal in a Senate investigation that led to the resignation of a powerful state senator agreed to a series of interviews for this exclusive story. She also agreed to share her revealing text messages and journal entries.

We took a look at the expenditures of a state senator's political committee and found he had hired a former Hooters “calendar girl” and a Playboy model with no political experience as campaign consultants. After our questioning, the senator, already under Senate investigation, resigned.

After Gov. Rick Scott and the state DOT tried to distance itself from blame after the collapse of a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University, I reviewed documents and spoke with current and former DOT officials and contractors to put the state's role in more accurate context.

The Florida Department of Revenue kept positions open for months and ousted others to make room for top staffers of the governor's budget office, who will soon be out of a job.

After eight residents in a Hollywood Hills nursing home died when the air conditioning malfunctioned after Hurricane Irma, Carol Marbin Miller and I looked back at how the industry blocked a legislative proposal a decade earlier that would have required emergency generators in all homes for the elderly.

Utility insider is caught on tape admitting the industry attempted to deceive voters into supporting restrictions on the expansion of solar by falsely portraying a constitutional amendment as a pro-solar plan. After our story, support plummeted and the amendment failed.

Our first deep dive into the million-dollar contributions, in what is destined to be the most expensive governor's race in Florida history.

Records showed that the governor's staff violated public records law by using private email accounts and cell phone numbers to shield a plan and a fundraising effort to raise money for a mansion project.

Our request for public records of Gov. Rick Scott's cell phone and email accounts produced insights into his handling of the crisis, raising questions about the strategy of routing emergency calls through the governor as conditions in nursing homes were becoming deadly.

On Jan. 11, 2019, Florida's newly elected governor and Cabinet acted on what the state has refused to do for 70 years: pardon the Groveland Four, calling it a miscarriage of justice. I wrote about the Legislature's attempt to get that going two years earlier, when their request was ignored by the then-Rick Scott administration.

After plotting the key decision points related to the struggle to clean polluted water from the Florida Everglades, a pattern emerged. It became this story.