Winter Park Voice
The Winter Park Voice is a nonprofit, nonpartisan online news site covering city government and quality-of-life issues in Winter Park, Florida, a city in Orange County just north of Orlando. It publishes free, without a paywall and without advertising, supported by tax-deductible contributions from its community. Founded roughly a decade before its nonprofit reorganization — its own editor, writing in March 2023, marked one year in the role, the Voice's official conversion to a nonprofit, and more than ten years of publication — the Voice was started by resident Tom Childers, passed to editor Anne Mooney, and has been edited since March 2023 by Beth Kassab, a journalist who spent 20 years at the Orlando Sentinel. In March 2024 it joined the Institute for Nonprofit News, the national network of nonprofit journalism organizations.
Origins: A Resident Starts Covering City Hall
The Voice began as the work of a civic-minded resident. Bungalower's account of its 2023 editorship change, a Central Florida publication, says the longtime policy and news outlet was founded roughly ten years earlier by resident Tom Childers, with a focus on Winter Park City Hall. Childers quickly made a name for himself by videotaping public meetings and sharing live commentaries through the Voice's newsletter channels and online.
That origin explains the Voice's enduring subject. Winter Park's government is a five-member City Commission whose decisions, as Kassab wrote on taking the job, determine the price of water and electricity and whether they are clean and reliable, whether the city adds parks and green space, how it addresses traffic congestion, the level of police and fire service, and even how easy it is to pull a permit to renovate a house or business. A resident with a camera at those meetings, reporting what was said and decided, was filling a gap left as regional newspapers lost the resources to give communities that attention. Childers later passed the news baton to Anne Mooney before relocating to California, and Mooney ran the Voice as editor until 2023.
Kassab's own account of the founding broadens the story slightly: because of a group of civic-minded residents who cared about maintaining an informed electorate, she wrote, the Voice was born to help fill the gap in Winter Park as other sources of local news faded. People from different political persuasions came together, in her telling, to ensure that city elections, growth and development and other significant events were documented by an independent source.
Beth Kassab Becomes Editor
On March 7, 2023, Anne Mooney announced that the Voice had named Beth Kassab as its new editor, effective immediately, with Mooney remaining affiliated in a much less active and visible role. Kassab expressed gratitude for the opportunity to build on a decade of work and take the Voice to the next level, and Mooney wrote that with Kassab at the helm the Voice was poised to continue delivering quality news while upholding the journalistic integrity and community engagement that had made it a trusted source.
Kassab brought a regional newsroom career to the small site. She worked as a journalist for more than 20 years, served at the Orlando Sentinel in various capacities as both an investigative reporter and a popular columnist, and was no stranger to Winter Park, having covered it off and on for the Sentinel. Her biography on the Voice notes that she graduated from the University of Florida, where she was editor in chief of the Independent Florida Alligator, served as chairwoman of the University of Florida Department of Journalism Advisory Board from 2018 to 2020, was a finalist in 2018 for the Scripps Howard First Amendment Award, and has been recognized for her body of work by the Florida Society of News Editors.
The appointment professionalized an outlet that had begun as resident volunteer work. A former metro daily columnist editing a hyperlocal nonprofit was itself a sign of how American local journalism had reorganized: experience once housed at a regional paper now applied to a single city's commission meetings, development fights and elections.
Becoming a Nonprofit and Joining INN
During Kassab's first year, the Voice formally became a nonprofit, started a Sunday newsletter called the Weekly Roundup, and joined the Institute for Nonprofit News. Kassab announced the INN membership on March 5, 2024, noting that the Voice was one of the newest members of a growing association of more than 400 nonprofit, nonpartisan journalism organizations dedicated to public service, from national names such as PBS NewsHour, PolitiFact and ProPublica to smaller Florida outlets including Oviedo Community News, the Florida Bulldog and the Key Biscayne Independent.
INN's purpose, as she relayed it, is to help such organizations develop revenue and business models to support strong reporting, collaborate on editorial and business innovation, share services and advance diverse leaders in news. For the Voice, membership provided a peer network and best practices for a very small organization attempting tasks — fundraising, governance, audience growth — that a one-city newsroom must handle alone.
The Voice's financial model is stated plainly to readers. It remains committed to providing its stories free from paywalls and ads. It operates on a small budget and relies solely on the generous support of its community. Contributions are tax-deductible and, Kassab told readers, go directly toward publishing news for the community. That clarity — no advertisers to please, no subscriber wall between residents and city news — is central to its pitch for donations.
What the Voice Covers
The Voice's stated mission is to bring readers important news about city government and issues that affect the quality of life in Winter Park. In practice that means City Commission meetings and votes, city elections and candidates, growth and development proposals, historic preservation, parks and green space, traffic, utilities, and police and fire services — the subjects Kassab enumerated as the decisions that most directly shape residents' daily lives and bills.
Preservation is a recurring example. Winter Park is known for historic homes, including properties designed by architect James Gamble Rogers II, and debates over demolitions and tighter preservation rules have drawn passionate public argument. Kassab has discussed that debate publicly as the Voice's editor, including in a 2026 appearance on the Talking Central Florida podcast, explaining the properties at risk and the question of what steps, if any, the city should take to protect its historic character. Coverage of that kind — a local architectural legacy, a commission weighing new rules, residents on both sides — is the Voice's home ground.
The Weekly Roundup, its Sunday newsletter launched in Kassab's first year, packages the week's city news for readers who do not follow meetings daily, extending the founding idea of newsletter commentary that Childers pioneered into a regular, edited digest.
Collaboration Through the News Collaborative of Central Florida
Small size has pushed the Voice toward collaboration. It participates in the News Collaborative of Central Florida, a partnership of regional media outlets, initially supported as an emerging journalism model by the Central Florida Foundation as a charitable investor. The collaborative brings journalists together to provide resources and information that help residents understand what they are voting on, with participating outlets able to dig deeper into local issues, cover more candidates and races, and engage more community members than any one of them could alone.
The foundation's president and chief executive, Mark Brewer, described the collaboration as arriving at a critical moment, when Central Floridians faced important decisions, and as strengthening the community by helping residents understand their ballots. Kassab, for the Voice, said its readers value trustworthy news about their city and that the partnership would bring them more information about the 2026 ballots, adding that, as a small nonprofit devoted to local news, the Voice believes collaborations are the way forward to keep credible, fact-based and independently vetted information accessible.
That stance — share reporting, share editing, compete less — is how the Voice extends its reach from Winter Park into regional election coverage without hiring a regional staff.
Why Its Editors Say Local News Matters
Kassab's March 2023 introduction to readers is the Voice's clearest statement of purpose, and it is worth summarizing on its own terms. She called Winter Park one of Florida's biggest small towns and described the Voice as an element of the city's spirit and identity, delivering important news for more than a decade as other sources faded. She noted an irony she had observed in 20 years of local journalism: many voters can repeat talking points about a presidential candidate or a national party, but most would be hard-pressed to name all the members of their city or county commissions — even though local officials make the most crucial decisions about quality of life and how much residents pay for it.
The Voice exists to close that gap for one city. Its bet is that a resident who knows the five people on the dais, what they voted on this week and what a development or utility decision will cost is a more effective citizen than one who only follows national politics. Everything the site does — meeting coverage, election reporting, the Weekly Roundup, ballot collaborations — serves that single, local proposition.
Digital Presence and Reader Relationship
The Voice is an online-only publication, and its relationship with readers is built around its website and its newsletters rather than a printed edition. That was true from its earliest form, when Childers shared live commentaries through newsletter channels and online alongside videotaped meetings, and it remains true in its current form, where the Weekly Roundup arrives on Sundays and stories are published free on the site as city news develops.
Because there is no paywall and no advertising, the reader relationship is also the business model. The Voice asks readers who value its City Hall coverage to make tax-deductible contributions, tells them plainly that it operates on a small budget and relies solely on community support, and reports back to them on milestones — becoming a nonprofit, launching the Sunday newsletter, joining the Institute for Nonprofit News — as shared accomplishments. Its editors sign their announcements, explain transitions of leadership in open letters to readers, and frame donations as going directly toward publishing news for the community. For a hyperlocal outlet, that transparency about money and mission is not incidental; it is how a site with no subscription revenue persuades a small city to keep a newsroom in existence.
The Voice in Winter Park Today
Today the Winter Park Voice is a small, established part of its city's civic infrastructure: a nonprofit newsroom with a professional editor, a Sunday newsletter, national network membership through INN, regional partners through the News Collaborative of Central Florida, and a readership asked, openly and repeatedly, to fund the work because no one else will.
Its history traces the wider reshaping of local news in miniature. A resident started taping meetings because no reporter was there. A successor kept the site alive. A veteran metro journalist took it over, made it a formal nonprofit, and connected it to national and regional support networks. The city it covers — its commission, its historic houses, its utilities, its elections — remained the constant. For Winter Park residents who want to know what their government did this week and what it will decide next, the Voice remains, as it has for more than a decade, the independent source built specifically to tell them.
