Reporting and Creative Team
As befitting the subject matter, preparing this report drew heavily on the talents of students at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications (CJC).
Janet Coats
Janet Coats served as project director, reporter & writer. Coats as the Managing Director of the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology at CJC. Prior to joining UF, she was Executive Director of Innovation and Strategy at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Communications. Her 25-year journalism career included serving as Executive Editor of the Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. She served five times as a Pulitzer Prize juror, including as chair of the Public Service Jury and the Investigative Reporting Jury.
Caleb Wiegandt
Caleb Wiegandt served as lead reporter for the report. Wiegandt is a UF senior majoring in journalism. He serves as the Communications Coordinator and Research Assistant for the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology. Wiegandt was a summer 2023 intern at the Courier Journal in Louisville, KY, and has worked as a freelance reporter for the Gainesville Sun. He will graduate in 2024 with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism and a Certificate in Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals and Applications. He plans to attend graduate school.
Lenore Devore
Lenore Devore served as a reporter and editor for the report. Devore’s 33-year journalism career included 22 years at the Lakeland (FL) Ledger, where she served as executive editor, managing editor and assistant managing editor. Before that, she worked for 10 years at Florida Today as a reporter and editor. For the last six years, Devore has worked as a freelance writer and editor. She is a 1984 graduate of UF’s College of Journalism and Communications.
Hub Brown
Hubert “Hub” Brown joined the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida as dean on June 25, 2021. Brown came to UF from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where he served as Associate Dean for Research, Creativity, International Initiatives and Diversity and an associate professor of broadcast and digital journalism. As Associate Dean, Brown managed the Newhouse School’s incentives to facilitate research and creative activity; aided department chairs, the School’s Diversity Committee and individual faculty members in promoting diversity in curriculum, faculty hiring and student recruitment; and promoted international engagement among faculty and students, including student and faculty exchange, memoranda of understanding and promotion of the Newhouse School abroad.
Geeta Anand
Geeta Anand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who serves as dean and professor at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Her stories on corporate corruption won the Wall Street Journal a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and she was lead reporter in a series on healthcare that was a finalist in 2003. She wrote the non-fiction book, “The Cure,” about a dad’s fight to save his kids by starting a biotech company to make a medicine for their untreatable illness, which was made into the Harrison Ford movie “Extraordinary Measures” in 2010. She worked as a journalist for 27 years, most recently as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in India.
Janet Coats
Caleb Wiegandt
Lenore Devore
Hub Brown
