UF Students' Lightning Safety Project Wins National Award, With Lessons for This Coast
A University of Florida class project on lightning, the top cause of weather deaths in the state, took a national student journalism prize; a companion project on ecotourism's limits placed as runner-up.
A national prize, a Florida problem
A team of eight University of Florida journalism students has won the Online News Association’s 2026 Student Journalism Award for “When Lightning Strikes,” a WUFT.org project examining why Florida leads the nation in lightning deaths. A second UF class project, “The Price of Paradise,” about the limits of ecotourism in Florida and Costa Rica, was named a runner-up in the same competition.
Both projects came out of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, under classes taught by senior lecturer Cynthia Barnett as part of UFCJC’s Florida Environment & Ag Desk. Neither project is set in Cedar Key or Levy County specifically, but both examine conditions, lightning risk and tourism pressure on natural areas, that shape daily life on this coast.
What the lightning project found
Students Emilia Arnold, Bea Anhuci, Isabela Reinoso, Claudia Schmidt, Katie Shealy, Kaitlyn Tarakji, Emma Twombly and Marta Zherukha spent the fall 2025 semester reporting on lightning science, safety and climate. UFCJC data journalism lecturer Gavin Off helped the team analyze more than 87 million recorded lightning strikes, and visiting professional David Kofahl helped turn hand-drawn illustrations into interactive graphics. The finished project explains what lightning is, how it can alter a life in an instant, how climate change may be affecting strike patterns, and what more the state could do to protect residents and visitors.
For a place like Cedar Key, a low-lying island city built around fishing docks, a public boat ramp, and a waterfront that draws day-trippers and paddlers into open water and marsh, the underlying statistic matters: Florida records more lightning deaths than any other state. Storm season here often means fast-moving afternoon systems over the Gulf, the same conditions the WUFT project analyzed at a statewide scale.
The ecotourism runner-up
The second project, “The Price of Paradise,” grew out of a spring 2025 course co-taught by Barnett and conservation photographer and filmmaker Gabby Salazar, including a reporting trip to Costa Rica. Students Maria Avlonitis, Kimberly Blum, Sabrina Castro, Gabriella Chavez, Alex Land, Franklin Lopez Martinez, Caia Reese, Luena Rodriguez-Feo Vileira, Nathan Thomas and Kat Tran documented how mass tourism can degrade the natural attractions that draw visitors in the first place, in both Florida and Costa Rica. The team also produced a full Spanish-language version of the project, “El Precio Del Paraiso.”
That question, how much tourism a fragile natural area can absorb before it changes the place, is not abstract for Levy County. Cedar Key’s economy runs on the same draw the students studied: clean water, working wetlands, wildlife refuges and a shoreline that visitors come to see undisturbed. The Lower Suwannee and Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuges, the scalloping season, and the town’s small footprint all depend on managing visitor pressure without eroding what brings people here.
Who backed the work
Both projects were produced under UFCJC’s Florida Environment & Ag Desk, overseen by Barnett, Innovation News Center director Ethan Magoc and Report for America corps member Rose Schnabel, with additional editing by Lillian Guevara-Castro. UFCJC librarian April Hines guided research for both. Funding came from the Florida Environment & Ag Desk, UFCJC’s Department of Journalism, and donors to the college’s Environmental Journalism Gift Fund.
The Online News Association’s Online Journalism Awards are an international competition recognizing excellence in digital journalism. Full versions of “When Lightning Strikes” and “The Price of Paradise,” including the Spanish-language site, are published on WUFT.org.