“I just like being in the middle of everything,” says Varn.
By EMILY WUNDERLICH
USFSP Student Reporter
Her desk is wrapped in yellow crime scene tape. Paper snowflakes splattered with red paint to look like blood hang from the ceiling. A mystery novel lies astray next to a pile of newspapers.
Kathryn Varn lovingly calls her workspace at the Tampa Bay Times “the murder pod” because, more often than not, that’s what she writes about when she’s there.
She divides her time between the St. Petersburg and Clearwater offices, covering breaking news and public safety for Pinellas County.
“I like just being in the middle of everything but not being beholden to anybody because we’re the independent press,” said Varn, 26. “You get to see all the action and be there without having to answer to anyone.”
The morning of Jan. 23 brought her a gift: a 32-page arrest report that she’d been requesting for a week. The story was about seven adults charged with human trafficking in St. Petersburg.
She arrived at the Pinellas County Judicial Center first thing in the morning and waited nearly an hour for some of the sensitive details to be redacted. Then she spent another hour reading through the document and highlighting the key facts.
A clerk told her she was the first reporter to obtain the information. She called her editor to relay the news. The pressure was on to break the story.
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Varn was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but moved to Fleming Island, near Jacksonville, when she was 15. At the University of Florida, she studied journalism as an entry to law. Her aunt was a public defender in Washington, D.C., and since Varn loves to write and argue, she figured it would be a good career choice.
Then she read a book of collected works by Rick Bragg in her introductory journalism class.
“The writing was just so beautiful and I just didn’t know that journalism could be like that,… and then I read that and was like, ‘Wait a minute, I might like this,’” she said.
At UF’s newspaper, the Independent Florida Alligator, she worked her way up from crime reporter to metro editor and eventually editor-in-chief. She completed internships at the Orlando Sentinel, Miami Herald and New York Times.
“I just liked the hustle of it,” she said. “I loved the rush of getting the interview you needed and writing on deadline… I also really like knowing things, keeping up with current events.”
But it was her internship — and later full-time job — at the Tampa Bay Times that cemented her passion for journalism.
“It has such a character as an industry that I just fit right in, which was something I never experienced before,” she said.
Although her newsroom continues to downsize like many others around the country, Varn says there’s no “dead weight” because everyone works so hard.
“Everyone’s wearing multiple hats… which can be nice because it opens up your possibility for stories and you can make a beat into what you want it to be and pitch stories that you’re interested in, but you got to say no to all the other stories,” she said.
When Markeis McGlockton was shot and killed outside a Clearwater convenience store in July, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri initially declined to charge the shooter, Michael Drejka, because of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.
Varn and another Times reporter, Zachary Sampson, looked into Drejka’s past and discovered a history of road rage and aggressive driving.
They published a story about it in August, and the Pinellas-Pasco state attorney’s office charged Drejka with manslaughter just days later. Varn says she doesn’t know whether the story figured into the state attorney’s decision.
“There’s so many different tensions in that story,” she said. “It was nice to put that out there and provide information to people who feel so much toward this case and really feel the injustices of it.”
In December, she spent a week in Panama City covering the aftermath of Hurricane Michael with Times photographer Monica Herndon. There, people thanked them for “keeping the story alive.”
“After all the national media had gone, we came back and checked in, and we’re going to keep checking,” Varn said.
She refuses to be discouraged by the public’s growing distrust of the media.
“I think what we do is really important, no matter what people think of it, and in some ways more important than it’s ever been.”
Her advice to student journalists? Don’t go to class, she joked.
While school is important and students should strive to succeed, a GPA is not nearly as valuable as a portfolio and professional experience, she said.
“If it comes down to having to choose between chasing a story and going to a class that you may or may not need to go to, chase the story,” she said.
Chasing the story pays off. She was the first to break the human trafficking story on Jan. 23.