“I came to love K through 12 education reporting,” says Reeves.
By AMY DIAZ
USFSP Student Reporter
Tacked onto the wall of her cubicle in the newsroom is a neon pink slip that angry teachers created for an unpopular Hernando County school superintendent.
On her desk is a Slinky she was given on her first day on the job in a whimsically named “fun pod” of cubicles where Slinky is the mascot.
Her desktop background is a picture of her cat, Fran, named after the animal rescue center where she found Fran and now volunteers once a month.
Her mom sometimes calls her Nancy Drew, but her name is Megan Reeves and she’s a journalist at the Tampa Bay Times.
Reeves, 26, graduated from the University of Florida in 2015. She started as an art major but after having to pour concrete and dress up as a clown, she turned to Plan B: journalism.
Her studies focused on photojournalism, and she took pictures for her college paper, The Independent Florida Alligator. She wrote her first story when she went on an assignment and the reporter didn’t show up. It ran on the front page.
Now 1-A stories are nothing new for Reeves, but she says it never stops being cool.
By the third day of her internship at the Times in 2016 she had a front-page story that posed a question about Gasparilla, Tampa’s annual boozy pirate fest: What happens to all the beads?
She spoke to environmental professionals and disclosed the unintended consequences of throwing beads from boat to boat while intoxicated. A lot of them end up in the water.
After the story ran on the front page, Reeves received a big envelope in inter-office mail with a letter from the managing editor and editor commending her on the story and welcoming her to the paper.
Her six-month internship turned into a year-long internship, but when it ended, she was told that there was no money in a shrinking newsroom budget to hire her full time.
“So I thought, OK, this is the end of the road, but I got to work there for a while so I just need to accept that,” Reeves said. “I started working at a restaurant, and I just freelanced for the Times until I could find something else.”
A few months later came a call offering her a job covering education in Hernando County for the Times. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it was a full-time job with benefits so she felt like she couldn’t say no.
It turned out well. She ended up reporting to Karen Peterson, whom she calls the best editor she’s ever worked with. She also fell in love with her beat and eventually earned a promotion to the St. Petersburg office.
“I came to love K through 12 education reporting, which I never thought that I would because it seemed kind of boring to me,” she said. “I wanted to cover city government or cops – you know, something sexy.”
The beat ended up being more interesting than she anticipated. Lori Romano, the Hernando school superintendent, became the focus of multiple stories. The School Board said Romano’s performance was below average, many people took issue with her, and in one day she fired 47 teachers from the most struggling school in the district.
“In a meeting, she looked across the table at me and said, ‘Your work is crap and I refuse to read it,’” Reeves said. “I said, ‘OK, that’s fine.’ She was fired the next day.”
Romano, who now works in the Pasco County school system, probably has her face on a dartboard, Reeves quipped.
Over time Reeves has built up her confidence and toughened her hide, although she said it’s challenging to be a young woman in the field.
“It’s hard because you want to be like that nice person that everyone thinks is nice,” Reeves said.
“But being tough doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t make you not you. It just means that you know how to hold your shit.”
Reeves has found public records to be an empowering tool. By getting as much information as she can from as many places as she can, she’s able to stand up to people like Romano and – more recently – Dallas Jackson, a Pinellas middle school principal who was removed by the superintendent after months of complaints from administrators, teachers and parents at the school.
Reeves said she has been threatened with lawsuits three times in her three years at the paper. One was filed and dropped, and the other two were never filed.
“The longer I do this, the less I care about telling happy stories,” Reeves said. “I think they’re important, but my time is limited. If I am going to work on something, I probably want it to make someone mad because that means that you’re trying to make change.”
When Reeves was an intern at her first job at the Lake City Reporter, she got a call from the sheriff’s office. An infant had died in a hot car, authorities said, after her father forgot she was in the back seat.
“I drove to the address and there was a girl a couple years younger than me standing in the front yard, just screaming, hyperventilating and grabbing her face,” Reeves said.
“It was just a terrifying experience. I’ve had to report on stories like that four different times, and every time I do I’m crying. I always call my mom.”
Another time, she wrote a story about a shelter in Pasco County for people with special needs during Hurricane Michael. She spoke to a man who had devoted his life to caring for his mother and watched the roof of their house fly off during the storm.
“Before I left, he just took my hand and held on to it, and I’ll remember that the rest of my life,” she said.
When Hurricane Irma hit, Reeves rode a school bus that was evacuating people from their homes in Hernando County to school shelters.
She met an 80-year-old woman who asked her to move a picture of her late husband off a counter and into a drawer to keep it from getting wet.
Reeves exchanged phone numbers with the woman in case she needed to ask follow-up questions. When the story was published, the woman called to thank her and praise the story.
“We started talking on the phone regularly and she actually became a good friend of mine,” Reeves said. “We ended up going to a play together because she told me when we were on the bus on the way to the shelter that she loved plays.”
Her job can be both emotionally taxing and fulfilling, Reeves said, but her team in the newsroom is always there to support her.
She was in Jacksonville visiting her parents last August when news broke of a mass shooting at a nearby video game tournament. She got to the scene and sent the details and quotes she gathered to reporters and an editor in St. Petersburg who assembled the story.
On a recent Sunday evening in the Times office in St. Petersburg, during the breaks between news briefs and public record requests, Reeves, another reporter and an editor cracked jokes about Gasparilla, gushed over instant-pot recipes and discussed the future of journalism in the digital age.
Her work is hard but rewarding, and sometimes it’s fun. Once a week the office has donuts.