RIP, Lucy Morgan, Ace Florida Statehouse Reporter For The Tampa Bay Times
Ms Morgan died in late September. I memorialized her on my Facebook page. I should have cross-posted the Facebook entry here because Ms. Morgan was the kind of statehouse reporter every state needs,
Slightly revised from my Facebook post of September 24, 2023.
I never heard of Lucy Morgan, the longtime Tallahassee correspondent for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida, until she died in September at age 82 after a career spanning close to five decades.
I saw Ms. Morgan’s obituary on September 24th, 2023, on The Laurel, a Connecticut state journalism blog. The author of The Laurel had not heard of Ms. Morgan neither until Poynter Institute republished her obituary from The Tampa Bay Times.
Every state needs at least one reporter like Ms. Morgan. The string of Florida public corruption stories she unearthed is astonishing. One was a tip she heard while sitting in a beauty shop in Western North Carolina. In an episode worthy of the early legerdemain years of Robert Moses, who slipped major power changes and big-dollar public finance obligations past an oblivious New York State legislature (see Robert Caro’s biography, The Power Broker), Ms. Morgan found a $50 million earmark for a “Taj Mahal” county courthouse tucked inside an unrelated piece of Florida legislation.
This is the kind of aggressive and nonpartisan reporting Statehouse reporters would do more if they were not simply a disappearing breed of reporters increasingly hampered by a lack of time, respources, and staff count.
By the way, check out the ancient cell phone Lucy Morgan is using in the photo shown here. I haven’t held one of those since the 1990s.
RIP, Lucy Morgan. We hardly knew ye, but we should have.