“When Lightning Strikes,” a WUFT.org project produced by a team of students in an Environmental Journalism class at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (UFCJC), has won the Online News Association’s 2026 Student Journalism Award. An international competition, ONA’s Online Journalism Awards are the only comprehensive journalism prizes honoring excellence in digital journalism worldwide.
Students Emilia Arnold, Bea Anhuci, Isabela Reinoso, Claudia Schmidt, Katie Shealy, Kaitlyn Tarakji, Emma Twombly and Marta Zherukha spent fall 2025 semester in UFCJC senior lecturer Cynthia Barnett’s “EJUF” class reporting on lightning, which kills more people in Florida than any other state. The project blended science, narrative, data, video, and interactive journalism to explain what lightning is; how it can change lives in a split second; how climate change could be impacting it; and what more Florida can do to keep residents and tourists safe.
UFCJC Data Journalism Lecturer Gavin Off helped the team analyze more than 87 million lightning strikes. Interactive and design visiting professional David Kofahl helped the students create interactive graphics from hand-drawn illustrations.
Another UFCJC class project published on WUFT.org, The Price of Paradise, was one of two runners-up for the Student Journalism Award. Barnett and conservation photographer and filmmaker Dr. Gabby Salazar cotaught the spring 2025 Advanced Science, Environment and Health Journalism course around a reporting project on the limits of ecotourism in Florida and globally, with a spring break trip to Costa Rica.
Students Maria Avlonitis, Kimberly Blum, Sabrina Castro, Gabriella Chavez, Alex Land, Franklin Lopez Martinez, Caia Reese, Luena Rodriguez-Feo Vileira, Nathan Thomas and Kat Tran blended narrative, video, photography, and data journalism to show how mass tourism can harm the very nature that draws visitors to Florida and Costa Rica. They also produced a full Spanish language site, El Precio Del Paraiso.
Both projects were part of UFCJC’s Florida Environment & Ag Desk overseen by Barnett, Innovation News Center Director Ethan Magoc and Report for America Corps Member Rose Schnabel, with additional editing by Lillian Guevara-Castro.
Research for both projects was guided by UFCJC librarian April Hines.
In addition to funding from the Florida Environment & Ag Desk, both projects received additional funding from the Department of Journalism and donors to UFCJC’s Environmental Journalism Gift Fund.