Collier Prize Symposium on State Government Accountability

Our 2026 Collier Prize Symposium will feature two dynamic keynote speakers: Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Julie K. Brown and news innovator Steven Waldman, president of Rebuild Local News.

The November 17 Symposium, a key feature of Collier Prize enrichment programming, will also include presentations from the reporting teams that won 2026 Collier Prize awards, representing KARE-11 in Minneapolis, CalMatters in California and the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times.

The event is free. You can participate in person at the University of Florida in Gainesville or online anywhere through our live-stream. Either way, you must register.

Julie Brown is widely considered one of the nation’s best investigative journalists. During her 40-year career, she has won some of the most prestigious prizes in journalism for exposing corruption and racial and human rights abuses in the nation’s criminal justice system.

Her 2018 Miami Herald investigation “Perversion of Justice” led to the arrests of sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell; the resignation of the U.S. secretary of labor; the first arrest of a British Royal in 400 years – and the downfall of countless other captains of industry, politics, media and academia around the world.

The ensuing scandal led to the release of millions of Justice Department files about Epstein’s sex trafficking and money laundering empire – and ignited a global reckoning about the delicate balance between power and morality.

Her previous investigations exposing deadly violence and civil rights abuses in Florida prisons led to firings and ultimately to reforms in the way inmates with mental disabilities are handled in the state prison system.

Last April, she was awarded a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize board. She also has won two George Polk Awards, a Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights Reporting, the Columbia Journalism Award, the Hillman Prize, PEN America’s Voice of Courage Award and in 2020, she was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people.

She is the author of “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story,” which has been acquired by Oscar-winning director Adam McKay for a limited streaming series. 

Steve Waldman is the founder and president of Rebuild Local News, a coalition that advocates for nonpartisan public policies to increase the number of reporters covering schools, city halls, businesses and other aspects of civic life.

He is also the co-founder and former president of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in newsrooms across the United States.

Before becoming an advocate for local journalism, Waldman was a journalist covering national politics for Newsweek, U.S. News and World Reports and Washington Monthly. Later, he wrote a report for the Federal Communications Commission, outlining the information needs of communities.

We’ll also have presentations on all three 2026 Collier Prize award-winning investigations:

— KARE11 reporter A.J. Lagoe and producer Kelly Dietz will tell the stories behind Housing Hustle, their investigation into a massive fraud scheme in Minneapolis’ Medicaid-funded Housing Stabilization Services, which led to indictments, resignations and convictions. In addition to winning first place in the 2026 Collier Prize for State Government Accountability, KARE11’s reporting won a Gerald Loeb award and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

— CalMatters reporters Robert Lewis and Lauren Hepler will unpack License to Kill, an investigation of California’s Department of Motor Vehicles. Their reporting revealed the California DMV routinely allowed drivers to stay behind the wheel despite histories of dangerous driving, including DIUs, crashes and numerous tickets. Some went on to kill — and many kept driving after they killed someone, only to kill again. 

Because there was no central database of vehicular homicide cases to examine, the reporters built one, compiling court records from all 58 California counties from 2019 to 2024, creating a record of more than 3,600 cases in that period.  (With mugs of Lewis and Hepler, already in the system)

— Reporters Lawrence Mower, Alexandra Glorioso and Justin Garcia from the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald will share how they unraveled a scheme to divert $10 million from a medicaid fraud settlement to fund efforts to defeat a recreational marijuana initiative and a scond constitutional amendment that would have repealed Florida’s six-week abortion ban. Note: Glorioso now works for ProPublica and the Texas Tribune and Mower has moved to the Houston Chronicle. 

The Symposium will take place Tuesday, Nov. 17 from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the Rion Ballroom at the University of Florida’s Reitz Student Union. For in-person attendees, lunch will be provided.

You can watch the 2025 event, featuring a keynote address from Knight Foundation President and CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, on demand.