On Tuesday night, a former Governor defeated a history-making incumbent Mayor with a margin so big it gives a mandate and then some. It was the culmination of a campaign season that saw well over $3 million in spending, most of it spent by a surging challenger running on the promise of positive change.

That’s the sort of race that garners plenty of media attention, and in the state’s largest media market, there’s a lot of that to go around.

So who are the winners and losers in the local media as it relates to coverage of the 2026 race between Mayor Ken Welch and former Gov. Charlie Crist?

To answer that question, I must first look inside my own house.

Florida Politics’ tricky balancing act

I can’t discuss media coverage of this race without first acknowledging what most already know: My own coverage of this race went well beyond a simple conflict of interest. With my wife, Michelle Todd Schorsch, serving as Chair of St. Pete Shines, the political committee supporting Crist for Mayor, and as the campaign’s chief strategist, and with our family’s long history of service to and friendship with Crist, there was no way I was ever going to remain neutral.

I put on my activist publisher hat, a practice that dates back to the founding of this country, and I make no apologies for it. What’s more, I was transparent about the conflict, even if I held zero reservations about injecting Florida Politics into the bloodstream of this race.

And then there’s Jesse Mendoza, the reporter I hired specifically to cover this race without my bias.

Jesse’s work covering the Mayor’s race was unimpeachable. His work was so good, in fact, that he often covered things that I, as a Crist booster, would rather he hadn’t.

No other outlet published as many stories about Welch’s endorsements. And while I was flooding the zone with negatives about Welch, no other outlet gave the incumbent Mayor as many positive stories as we did, thanks to Jesse.

Don’t believe me? Take a scroll through the Team Welch Facebook page and count up the number of Florida Politics stories it shared.

Tampa Bay Times is fair but sparse

The Tampa Bay Times’ coverage of this race was both fair and critical, but it was lacking.

Lead reporter Colleen Wright was especially fair. She always gave Michelle and the Crist campaign the opportunity to respond, to share favorable news and counter the bad. She even gave me the opportunity to respond when campaign news blended into Peter Schorsch news.

The problem is not with Wright’s skill as a journalist or her professional ethics. It’s that I wish there were five more of her.

As Mayor-elect, Crist will no doubt face scrutiny, as he should. While I trust Wright to be fair, it would be easy for me to wish her story count would stay low to keep my guy out of any potentially bad spotlight.

But that would be a rejection of something vitally important — the need for quality reporting to keep those in power accountable. We need more coverage of St. Pete City Hall. More coverage of local political races. More coverage of the Tampa Bay Rays. Wright is just one person.

I will say, it was nice to see Times Political Editor Michael Van Sickler back with a reporter’s byline. I hated the story he wrote about Crist in Minnesota, but it was well researched and, again, it was fair. I would have liked him to step back into that role 10 more times.

Yet even that is nowhere near the level of coverage the race deserved, or the level City Hall continues to deserve. Someone at the Times really should have explored what happened to Welch’s campaign cash — a multi-state crime featuring a thieving former political committee treasurer. It was a story begging to be told.

I can also pick some nits with some of the outlet’s story choices. The one about Crist speaking at St. Pete High is a salient example of the Times missing the forest for the trees.

And it strikes me as odd considering the same outlet also rejected an exclusive on Crist’s initial fundraising haul, which clocked in at more than $700,000. Michelle offered the Times the story first, and the newspaper turned it down. Why? They said it wasn’t “fair” to Welch.

WTAF does fair have to do with it?

Ten years ago, Marc Caputo, Matt Dixon, and I would each have cut off a pinky for fundraising numbers to publish in our newsletters. Fast-forward to now, and you have the region’s newspaper of record passing on genuine news out of some ill-advised concept that it’s unfair to one of the candidates.

The absurdity is profound.

I’m also disappointed that the Times has unilaterally defanged its editorial board. The Times endorsement — now structured as voting recommendations from Times Chairman and CEO Conan Gallaty and Viewpoints Editor Graham Brink — was both well-constructed and important to voters, especially for the Times readers who, if you’ve been paying attention, are essentially a bunch of Democrats who needed permission to vote against the city’s first Black Mayor.

During this race, the pair editorialized on the Rays stadium saga, and that’s exactly what they should be doing — sifting through all the noise and opinions to find clarity.

The question, much like with straight news coverage, is why they’re not doing that more often. They should be expanding the editorial board and the number of columnists on staff or as contributors, so the paper can rebuild what was once a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial board into a tool for information, and a weapon against the perils of politics.

Yet by and large, Wright and the Times overall have treated this race more like a City Council race. Worse still, they gave this multimillion-dollar race about as much real estate in their paper as they would have given a Largo City Council contest 20 years ago.

Axios is more like Axi-nope

Pardon my French, but Axios shit the bed.

As the local outlet of the latest brainchild of POLITICO alumni Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, you would think coverage of a major mayoral election would have come with a stronger pedigree, one to match that of the outlet’s creators.

Instead, Allen and VandeHei should be ashamed of this particular branch of Axios.

Kathryn Varn bragged that they have 190,000 subscribers. Maybe that’s true, but here’s the thing: I don’t know who their audience is.

Are they writing to a general audience like the newspaper? Are they writing to the C-suite like the Tampa Bay Business Journal? Are they writing to politicos like we do? Are they trying to provide a counter to any of these outlets? I genuinely don’t know what their market position is.

With a disjointed array of coverage, it just feels less relevant than something created to provide hyper-local coverage should be.

And in the meantime, I can’t think of a single piece of information Axios Tampa Bay published that affected the St. Pete Mayor’s race.

What’s more, the outlet is already behind on next year’s higher-profile Tampa mayoral race.

Varn has a solid reputation from her time at the Tampa Bay Times, but I’ve seen nothing published at her new outlet that makes me want to subscribe. If I had to pay for this, even if it were just $4.99 a month, I don’t know that I would. There are 1,000 Substacks that are more informative than this outlet.

Duke obsession

As an aside about both Axios and the Tampa Bay Times, I’m not sure I fully understand the obsession with the Duke Energy issue, whereby a bunch of climate activists want the city to create its own municipal electric utility.

I fully understand that whoever is Mayor — and we now know that will be Crist — will have to deal with this issue one way or another. So I understand the relevance of asking the question. But there’s a difference between asking a question and disproportionately asking only that question.

For the Times, it at least makes financial sense. The paper is enjoying grant and foundation funding that is loosely tied to environmental reporting.

I fail to see why Axios repeatedly asks about it in a way that is disproportionate to the issue’s relevance. I poll St. Pete often, and for a lot of reasons. I can confidently say that I know the city very well. I can also confidently say the Duke issue is being manufactured by climate activists, not something that resonates with voters.

St. Pete Catalyst wins across the board

No local news outlet provided more coverage of this race than the St. Pete Catalyst, not even my own publication, if you exclude my own columns about the race.

The outlet, along with the Poliverse project to which it contributes, has covered virtually every press release the Crist campaign has sent. Its coverage was fair to both candidates, and it was thorough, from explaining important debate themes to posting candidates’ Election Day plans and everything in between.

St. Pete Catalyst is proving its worth as a local outlet working to fill gaps the area’s newspaper of record is leaving as it focuses on higher-profile state and national issues.

Bay News 9 showed up

I give big kudos to Bay News 9. The outlet is sometimes mocked as something watched only from doctors’ office lobbies, and local television news isn’t always the first place politically savvy viewers turn for political news.

But the outlet outdid itself, including a great human interest story from reporter Josh Rojas spending a day with Crist, and another with Welch, on the campaign trail.

The outlet also deserves credit for hosting the race’s only televised debate, giving all voters access to vital information ahead of the General Election in a way anyone could watch from anywhere. Moderator Holly Gregory is an experienced voice in local politics and did an excellent job keeping the debate civil and informative.

Bay News 9 reporters provided thorough coverage of the campaign operations during the final hours, spotlighting various campaign stops the night before Election Day and throughout Election Day. And the outlet’s coverage of Crist’s victory was equally thorough and fair.

Tampa Bay Business Journal has its place

The Tampa Bay Business Journal proved its worth as a niche publication whose readership is largely the C-suite. The outlet broke numerous stories, including about the Tampa Bay Rays stadium saga, and was especially relevant in the Mayor’s race for its coverage of developers souring on the Welch administration.

TBBJ, through its reporting, was able to explain an issue voters seemed to sense without being able to put their finger on it. Welch has largely been an obstructionist Mayor, and developers were increasingly frustrated as investments in proposed St. Pete developments often fell through. What many St. Pete residents and voters may not realize is that those developers spend considerable sums to make pitches, develop plans, and conduct feasibility studies in preparation for planned developments.

Deals fall through, and that’s just a fact of life, but the Welch administration’s track record went well beyond a broken-down deal here and there. TBBJ reporters did a great job of outlining that without injecting bias.

Tampa Bay Breakfast Club is an important model

I’d be willing to bet a lot of folks in my neighborhood don’t listen to the Tampa Bay Breakfast Club, a local podcast whose audience is largely the Black communities of the Southside. But to anyone who hasn’t been initiated, let me just tell you: You should definitely listen.

I have been, and I have learned so much about the politics of Midtown that often go unspoken outside certain circles.

The conversations are not only worth listening to, they’re worth replicating. Imagine if you had several more hyper-local platforms on which to discuss issues affecting individual neighborhoods and communities rather than the entire city.

We hear a lot of talk about establishing an informed electorate. This, folks, is one possible way to achieve it, and on a much deeper level than campaign slogans and taglines.

We get it, CL, you’re edgy

Creative Loafing has an important place in Tampa Bay area news coverage as the region’s main alt-weekly. It’s a sort of oasis for frustrated liberals and disaffected partisans looking for camaraderie.

So it’s unsurprising the outlet was going to be against an establishment guy whose campaign is run by an establishment kind of gal.

But my lord, guys, do you have to be quite so angry in your discontent?

Take its coverage of election results. The headline is vanilla, but fine. It matter-of-factly states that “Charlie Crist has been elected Mayor of St. Petersburg,” but then immediately, before the article even begins, includes a subhead that lands with a thud: “The mayoral race was one of the ugliest the city has seen.”

The story itself begins with a finger-wagging “Crist won the blue city in spite of his connections to Republican donors and an embattled Republican political operative.” It then goes on to defend Welch’s failures before pivoting to, wait, what’s this … me.

When an outlet has to jump through so many hoops to prop up its preferred candidate that “Welch campaigned on convincing voters there were more successes than letdowns in his first term” seems like a flex, you’ve lost the battle before it’s even begun.

I have no problem with Creative Loafing taking a counter position on anything. In fact, I think it’s important to democracy and journalism that they do. But in this case, I’m not even sure what they’re countering. Crist won — maybe lose the tone.

The new alternative media

A local watchdog, Brad Falbo, launched a website called Burg’s Eye View to scrutinize local government spending. Falbo, who launched the site out of frustration over what he perceived as a lack of transparency at City Hall, analyzed data obtained through a public records request and found Welch’s administration had spent nearly $15,000 over a six-month period on food orders from Jimmy John’s and Hungry Howie’s.

Falbo is not a journalist, but the information is something a journalist might have found back in the days when traditional newsrooms were fully stocked. And therein lies the disruption to media — more and more often, the most interesting findings are coming from outside traditional news channels, such as government watchdogs, podcasts, and Substacks.

Other reporters of note

I’d be remiss if I did not give a hat tip to FOX 13’s Evan Axelbank, who has proven himself throughout this campaign as an ace reporter. He asks great questions without the gotchas; he’s pleasant to speak with; and he’s always educated on the issues. His work is reminiscent of old-school journalistic values, under which it’s OK to be chummy as long as you keep the content professional.

But then there’s Mark Parker. Oh dear God, this poor, troubled man. Here’s the thing with Mark. He’s actually a pretty decent journalist. His stories, generally, check all the bare-minimum boxes of journalistic integrity. Kudos there, I guess.

But where Mark goes wrong is in his social media ramblings, whose comments section is more about him having a conversation with himself than anything else. His posts typically land late at night, and one could easily question whether he’s absolutely plastered when he posts them.

Parker got himself fired from the St. Pete Catalyst early in the mayoral campaign after making ill-advised comments criticizing Crist in very bold language. I’m not sure how one expects to cover a race when they publicly declare their support for one of the candidates. And before anyone clutches their pearls because that’s what I did, there’s a big difference. I said I was doing it, and I disclosed my family’s relationship on every single story posted about the mayoral race. Parker was a Welch booster masquerading as an unbiased reporter.

You’d think that would have taught him a lesson, but no. He quickly landed a new job with Power Broker Magazine, a publication whose work “amplifies the Black American experience.” Parker, who is white, was later fired from that publication too, after posting an arguably racist comment.

Now he’s running his mouth again about Crist, mocking the Mayor-elect for his socks and shoes. He once suggested that, since Crist is in his 70s, he should “just relax and die.” He also suggested that I and anyone affiliated with Florida Politics be brought up on RICO charges.

Parker is launching a new media site this week called Tampa Bay Reporter. While I guess it’s a smart move for a guy who can’t seem to stop getting fired for saying dumb shit on social media, good luck with the new endeavor after likely pissing off one of the region’s top newsmakers. Last I checked, St. Pete is a big chunk of the Tampa Bay region, so unless Parker intends to ignore St. Pete City Hall come January, he likely has not ingratiated himself with the incoming Crist administration.

The bigger picture

What this race made clear is that the region’s media ecosystem is thinner and more fragmented than it was a decade ago. The Times no longer owns every consequential local story, but the Catalyst, Bay News 9, TBBJ, community podcasts, and independent watchdogs are helping to fill the gaps. More voices can leave the region better informed, but only if those voices do the reporting, disclose their interests, and understand that there is more to journalism than provocation.

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Ed. note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee that backed Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.