PHOTO BY PARKER JOHNSON VIA UNSPLASH.COM
A collective of Central Florida news outlets has produced a nonpartisan voter guide for the August 18 primary election. The News Collaborative of Central Florida brought together WKMG-News 6, the Orlando Sentinel, the Winter Park Voice, VoxPopuli of West Orange, Oviedo Community News, the Osceola News-Gazette and Central Florida Public Media for the project. LkldNow and the Ocala Gazette are also participating in the group’s 2026 election coverage.
A second, separate collaboration links Central Florida Public Media with five public media outlets around the state: WUSF in Tampa, WLRN in Miami, WJCT in Jacksonville, WGCU in Fort Myers and WUWF in Pensacola. It is the second consecutive cycle in which those stations have worked together on a statewide voter guide.
“From the beginning, the goal of the News Collaborative of Central Florida was to better serve our communities with even more access to trustworthy information,” said Judith Smelser, chair of the NCCF task force and president and general manager of Central Florida Public Media via a prepared statement. “This voter guide reflects the power of collaboration. By working alongside both our local news partners and fellow public media outlets across Florida, we’ve been able to expand election coverage beyond what any one newsroom could accomplish independently.”
Each collaboration developed its own standardized candidate questionnaire. Candidates who did not respond are noted as such in the guide, and publicly available information from campaign websites and social media is included where possible.
The collaborative formed after the 2024 Central Florida Journalism Ecosystem Summit, an event created by Central Florida Public Media, the Central Florida Foundation and Oviedo Community News. Its first joint project came in 2025, when members produced more than 100 stories examining the local effects of Florida’s Unauthorized Public Camping and Public Sleeping law. The group announced earlier this year that the 2026 midterms would be its next editorial focus.
The guide went live Friday, July 31, at cfpublic.org/vote.
