Tampa Bay Times

“If you eat food, you are being lied to every day.” An investigation into the claims restaurants make when they say they “source locally.”

How did a county in Florida find itself in the middle of a heroin epidemic?

How $100 million in cuts created chaos in Florida’s mental hospitals. A Tampa Bay Times and Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigation.

In a neglected Florida cemetery, a search for the lost boys of a brutal reformatory school and the reasons why they died.

In a small, impoverished town in Florida, a high school football player works diligently to get a college scholarship and fulfill his dreams of playing for a Division I school.

Florida trauma centers charge outrageous fees the moment you come through the door:

Before any X-ray was taken, any blood collected, any medicine delivered to his broken body, crash victim Eric Leonhard was charged $32,767 just to pass through the doors of a Fort Pierce trauma center. The bill was not for the surgery Leonhard needed to piece together his shattered pelvis. In fact, after exactly 40 minutes, doctors decided to transfer him because they didn’t have the right specialist for the job. So they loaded Leonhard onto a helicopter and sent him to another hospital on Florida’s east coast. Lawnwood Regional Medical Center still charged Leonhard, an uninsured tour boat captain, nearly $1,000 for every minute he spent with the medical team that couldn’t fix him.

A reporter grapples with the suicide of a source:

The reporter-source relationship is a complicated one that defies easy description. It borrows a little from the salesman-buyer relationship, the therapist-patient relationship, the police officer-witness relationship, sometimes even the growing intimacy of a friendship. We work hard to gain access and trust, and generally we avoid doing anything that stops a source from talking once she gets started.

“How are you now?” I asked at the time.

“I’m suffering horribly . . . but I’m not suicidal,” she said. “It’s a soothing thing. I don’t really want to do it. But it helps me calm down, it helps me sleep to think about the possibilities to end the suffering.”

If I had possessed some sort of device that could peer inside her brain and pick up some biological trace amongst the billions of nerve cells and circuits that would indicate she was likely to commit suicide, would I have stopped the interview?

Reporters from the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting spent a year scrutinizing 5,800 charities nationwide that pay for-profit telemarketing companies to solicit donations on their behalf. As much as 90 cents for every dollar of those donations go directly to pay for the for-profit companies that are “dialing for dollars”:

Part One: Dirty Secrets of the Worst Charities

Part Two: A Failure of Regulation

Part Three: The Reynolds Family Empire

A teenager with cancer is fighting to make it to her high school graduation:

“At the end of her junior year, the doctors said there was nothing more they could do for Lyndsey. ‘Six months to a year,’ they told her. She might not even be alive for her family to break the no-applause rule.

“But the principal, Dan Evans, just told her, ‘Okay.’ They’d get her to June 5 at Tropicana Field.

“And so began a much quieter race to graduation, one that has not announced itself by shrieking in the hallways or picnicking on the campus lawn, but with all of that urgency and more.”

A young woman tries out a bionic hand after losing her fingers and toes:

“Her dad wonders if the financial burden of the bionic hand is worth it. A left hand device won’t be considered until that’s clear. If the bionic hand’s too hard or awkward to use, will it collect dust on her nightstand? ‘She’s good without it. She’s so independent,’ he said once in the doctor’s office. ‘She does it all on her own.’

“Tisa’s progress depends on her determination, Bauer, the orthotist, tells them. And she has already come so far.”