Silas Morgan, the 22-year-old son of Walmart employees and a first-generation college student, had an important call to make.

Morgan was part of an investigative news team at the University of Florida looking into the state’s most influential and powerful elected officials.

Weeks prior, after Morgan had pored over campaign filings, financial reports, property listings and voter registration records, he reported that state Rep. Bruce Antone, D-Orlando, had listed his home on official paperwork in District 40, not District 41, where he had been elected to serve.

“The discovery raises questions about whether Antone, elected seven times to the state House, was legally eligible to hold office,” Morgan wrote in his April piece, which pointed out the residency rules for Florida’s state House candidates and incumbents.

Antone was supposed to live in the district where he was running at the time of the election and maintain residency there for his entire term, Morgan reported. But in a campaign filing ahead of the 2022 election, Antone listed his address as a house in District 40 — the wrong district. Then his campaign said Antone’s wife was living at a different house in District 40.

“Antone said the two are still legally married but have been separated on-and-off for years, and that he sometimes still lived with her,” Morgan reported.

Silas Morgan (Willie J. Allen Jr./Orlando Sentinel)

The day after Morgan confronted Antone with his findings, the state lawmaker changed his address back to District 41. Antone now said he lived in an apartment with a 72-year-old district aide from his legislative staff.

“We kind of giggled internally, and then we told Silas, ‘You have to call and find out: Why did he do this? And he called back and to his credit, Antone was very upfront,” said Ted Bridis, the former editor of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press investigative team now teaching the next generation of reporters how to question politicians and pour over public records.

Antone said “he forgot to update his voting records to reflect what he said was his new residential address,” Morgan’s story said. “He confirmed he changed it because of the reporter’s inquiry.”

Morgan and Bridis’ other student journalists distribute articles through the UF-run Fresh Take Florida news service, which shares its content for free with about 100 outlets, including CNN, The Associated Press, Gannett and Tribune newspapers. (Donors help Fresh Take Florida operate in perpetuity at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.)

These UF investigations come at a time when understaffed professional newsrooms often struggle to scrutinize candidates and dig deeper into their backgrounds. During an election year and a demanding news cycle, some media coverage turns politics into a horse race or misses the candidates’ red flags.

Work like Silas Morgan’s — who Bridis calls “a bulldog” — aims to fill the gaps with thoughtful, deeply reported coverage.

Classic journalism

The college students’ stories at Fresh Take Florida are classic journalism, reporting at its best. They follow the money. They take the time to read mortgage documents and other public records. They scrutinize what public officials say to hold them accountable.

“They’re legit. They know what they’re doing, and, frankly, they’re doing the kind of digging and comprehensive work that the rest of us ought to be doing,” Bridis said. “Shame on us professionals for not following this stuff up.”

But, perhaps taking a cue from their name, the students at Fresh Take sometimes offer new twists on classic reporting. To generate story ideas and to help with fact-checking, Fresh Take Florida built an internal website to pull public records. It’s a gold mine for finding officials’ phone numbers —  Florida’s version of LexisNexis as Bridis described it.

The password-protected website, called Florida Data, provides access to five years of voter registration records, property records, traffic tickets, car crash reports and hunting/fishing licenses. The website creates automatic alerts, like in Antone’s case, when the elected officials’ listed address doesn’t match their district boundaries.

Fresh Take Florida already offers free access to the website to the major outlets, such as the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald. Starting this month, the news service will share it with any outlet publishing their stories, Bridis said.

“If it’s a small weekly newspaper down in Okeechobee, you may not be able to afford LexisNexis accounts for all your staff, but we can almost get you there,” Bridis said.

Uncovering a wider problem

The Fresh Take Florida story about Bruce Antone raised more doubts about his residency claims.

UF students knocked on doors and talked with the neighbor of the aide who Anton claimed to live with. She said she never saw a man living in the apartment.

Meanwhile, Antone had kept getting mail at his property outside the district, according to state campaign filings.

“Where does Antone live in Central Florida, compared to where he has run for office over his long legislative career? For more than a decade, it’s been hard to know for sure,” Morgan wrote.

Last month, Morgan published an exclusive follow-up in the Orlando Sentinel. Antone’s Democratic challenger in the primary filed an ethics complaint against him based on the residency questions raised in Morgan’s Fresh Take Florida story.

And Antone wasn’t the only Florida lawmaker living outside his district, Morgan found.

Again, Morgan pulled public records and read mortgage documents while reporting on a GOP candidate in Miami running for House District 118 in a special election last year.

Michael David Redondo said he signed a 12-month lease for an apartment and updated his voter records with his new address in June 2023. But days earlier, Redondo “bought a two-bedroom luxury, waterfront condominium for $950,000 that is 20 miles away in House District 113,” Morgan’s story said.

Redondo agreed to live in the condo as his principal residence for at least one year in the terms of the mortgage requirements he signed.

Morgan confronted Redondo, who works as a lawyer, to ask if he was violating the contract by living in the apartment.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Redondo said.

The Miami Herald published the Fresh Take Florida story in December after Redondo narrowly won the special election.

The headline read, “Just-elected Florida lawmaker has a new waterfront condo. It’s not in his district.”

Redondo’s Democratic challenger is now suing and asking the courts to remove Redondo from office. Redondo wants the lawsuit to be thrown out and has filed to run for reelection, Morgan reported.

Big scoops

When Fresh Take Florida launched in 2019, Bridis envisioned his students covering Tallahassee for news outlets that were getting rid of their legislature coverage to save money.

Since then, though, the stories have evolved beyond the state capitol.

His students chartered a helicopter to survey hurricane damage in the coastal Big Bend area. Three students traveled to the Bahamas for a week to cover the Hurricane Maria relief efforts.

Ted Bridis (AP Photo/J. David Ake)

They occasionally break big stories, like one about a Gainesville hospital shutting down surgeries because of contaminated instruments, or an entrepreneur with a shady past attempting to get state money to develop new digital license plates in Florida. (The used car salesman from Kansas threatened to sue the news service if the students didn’t take the story down. Fresh Take Florida refused to do so and he ultimately backed down, Bridis said.)

When Gov. Ron DeSantis bragged that the state recruited a dozen New York City police officers, the news service dug into their backgrounds. Some of their pasts were unseemly, like one who had been fired as a Walmart security guard, and another who was one of several NYPD plainclothes officers caught up in a federal lawsuit for handcuffing and brutally beating a man.

The UF students often find themselves telling big stories for the first time in what will be busy journalism careers.

UF student Karina Elwood hadn’t stepped into a courthouse before until she went to the federal appeals court in Atlanta for oral arguments in the legal fight to give ex-felons the right to vote after voters approved a ballot initiative in 2018. Elwood remembered walking into the courtroom and feeling undressed in boots because she didn’t own dress shoes as a college student.

“It was one of the greatest training grounds that I had in college,” said Elwood, now a 25-year-old education reporter at The Washington Post. Elwood learned how to report on the political process and the sausage-making of the state’s laws for her Fresh Take Florida stories.

Fresh Take Florida graduates have gone on to work at The New York Times, USA Today, the Tampa Bay Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Morgan graduated in May and was hired as a reporter at the Orlando Sentinel, his hometown paper. The Sentinel had already published Morgan’s Antone investigation while he was still in college.

Bridis’ students are not intimidated to call the governor’s office or corner a lawmaker outside a committee hearing. They are still learning, however, in the classroom.

Bridis heavily edits his students’ stories and reviews records with them. The stakes are high. Bridis said he knows he could be one correction away from shutting down. Even though Fresh Take Florida is the teaching hospital of journalism, there’s no room for serious errors in stories appearing in the most well-read newspapers across the state.

“We have the enthusiasm and the energy and the zeal. And (Bridis) has the wisdom,” Morgan said. “He is teaching us how to think and know what to look for, so that when we graduate, we can do this on our own.”

Editor’s note: Gabrielle Russon is a freelance journalist in Orlando. She worked at the Orlando Sentinel from 2014 to 2021.