WUFT Report for America Corps Member Rose Schnabel has been named a recipient of the 2026 Waldo Proffitt Award for Outstanding Environmental Journalism, one of Florida's premier environmental reporting honors. Schnabel shared this year's award with the Miami Herald's "Built on Sand" investigative series.
The award, administered by the University of South Florida's Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications, recognizes excellence in environmental journalism across the state. Judges selected Schnabel's body of work focused on rural environmental coverage for its reporting on inequities affecting communities in North Central Florida.
The award-winning collection included reporting on Florida's pine straw industry, challenges facing the timber sector, environmental impacts of pine straw harvesting, threats to a rare native plant species from a proposed toll road, and odor complaints connected to a landfill serving a rapidly growing region.
"WUFT’s Rural Environmental Coverage by Rose Schnabel also shows environmental reporting at its best," a judge for the award wrote. "With exquisite writing across a collection of stories about pine-straw harvesting, a threatened native plant population, and a landfill affecting a low-income community, Schnabel exposed significant inequities that resulted in public action."
The Waldo Proffitt Award honors journalism that advances public understanding of environmental issues and reflects the legacy of the late Florida journalist and editor Waldo Proffitt.
Schnabel will be recognized during an award presentation hosted by the Zimmerman School on Oct. 20.