Why Polk County Deserves Its Own Voice
Somewhere around age ten, I started writing a comic strip. I called it Newsbeak, scrawled across the top of lined notebook paper in my best attempt at a real newspaper masthead, complete with a little character I invented who reported on the world the way I saw it. I eventually squeezed an “r” into the title to make it Newsbreak, because even then I understood that news was supposed to mean something beyond the headline. I did not think much about it at the time. It was just something I did because it was something I loved.
I did not grow up dreaming of a newsroom exactly. I grew up dreaming of making a difference, and that dream took me through classrooms and nonprofit organizations and communities I poured myself into for decades. I became a counselor and an educator. I became a writer. I became the kind of person who walks into a room, sees what could be, and cannot stop talking about it until something happens.
We left Seattle in 2022 not chasing a dream, but something quieter. Land. Community. A place rooted enough to hold a family, where neighbors wave from porches and people show up when it counts. We drove inland, planted ourselves in the Heartland of Florida, and Polk County let us in before we even finished unpacking.
It happened fast. Within days, we had neighbors. Within months, we had a community, familiar faces at the farmers market, new friends forged over hibachi in Winter Haven, introductions to spouses after finding out we attended the same church. We began paying attention to city council votes and school board decisions, to businesses opening on the main drag and families down the street who could use a meal. When a place lets you in, you open your arms right back.
Paying attention is how you fall in love with a place. It is also how you start to see its gaps. Polk County deserved better than what it was getting in terms of local news coverage. Not because the people here do not care, but because the outlets that existed were not built to tell the full story of this amazing community. Chain-owned papers. Hyperlocal papers and neighborhood apps. Facebook groups full of complaints and secondhand information. Tampa and Orlando swooping in for the big headlines and then going back to their own markets. The rest of Polk County, from Haines City to Lake Wales to Poinciana, was largely invisible in its own media landscape. And I could not stop talking about it.
With nearly a million residents, there are no comprehensive, independent, locally-owned, county-wide news outlets in Polk County.
I kept saying that someone should build something different. Something locally owned and community-rooted that covered every corner of this county, not just Lakeland, not just the traffic accidents and the booking reports, but the stories of the people who were doing remarkable things in their neighborhoods and the challenges their communities were quietly facing. The rapid growth that was straining infrastructure in places like Lake Alfred, where water pressure cannot keep up with the pace of new construction. The farming families and citrus orchards that have defined this county for generations are now navigating a landscape where it is increasingly profitable to sell the land rather than work it. The small business owners and the volunteers and the school teachers and the coaches who make this place worth living in. Those stories existed. Nobody was telling them.
The year before we bought our first home in Florida, our world cracked open. My husband suffered a massive heart attack with complete blockage and successive organ failure. He survived because a gracious family in the depths of their own loss chose to give life through organ donation.
We do not speak lightly about second chances in our house. We know exactly what they cost.
When my husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2024, I needed extra income to help with medical expenses beyond what my teaching salary provided, and an opportunity to work with my brother landed at exactly the right moment. He had already built his own company, CopperPress, with over two decades of experience managing tech development at several publishing organizations. We got right to work, he bringing technical architecture and strategy, and me bringing ten years in education, a lifetime of writing, and a growing conviction that a community starved of its own story will eventually stop knowing itself.
Over that year, what began as a way to stay afloat became an editorial calling. The deeper I went into publishing, into audience-building and sustainability and editorial identity, the clearer the answer became. This was not just a project. It was a solution for Polk County, my county. The timing was still wrong. Full-time teaching and caregiving left no margin for launching something responsibly. But the idea had taken root, and roots do not negotiate with inconvenient seasons.
Then February came.
In February 2026, my husband lost his battle to colon cancer. In the weeks and months that followed, Polk County, the place we had chosen and the community we had woven ourselves into, wrapped around our family and refused to let go. Neighbors I had never met appeared at the door with hot meals. Church friends scrubbed floors and bathrooms. My school rallied. Friends and family flew across the country, and the community that had become mine, loved on them too. People who barely knew us showed up, because that is what happens when a community is paying attention. It reminded me, in the most devastating way imaginable, of exactly why a county like this deserves better than an algorithm for its morning news.
In the middle of all that grief, someone looked at me and offered the simplest challenge:
“Your life is not over. Think about what comes next.”
My mind kept coming back to places like Publix, and not just for the pharmacy or a really, really good sandwich. Publix was founded just five miles from where I sit on my laptop. It is now in eight states and growing, even as my high school friend in Tennessee raves about the chicken tender Pub-Sub. IYKYK. There is something profound about building inside a place people underestimate, about planting with care, scaling with intention, and watching something outlive every reason it should not have worked. Great things have always come from here. There is no reason to believe that era is behind us.
The Citrus Tea is my answer to the question grief finally made room for. It is a free, independent, locally owned, county-wide digital publication built for all of Polk County, not just the largest cities, or the individual neighborhoods already covered in private groups on social media, or traffic accidents and booking reports.
This publication exists for the family in Haines City trying to figure out where the closest food bank is after losing a job. For the small business owner in Lake Wales who deserves a feature article, not an outdated Google review. It is for the first-time voter in Winter Haven who needs to know what is on the ballot before entering the booth, and for the self-proclaimed foodie looking for the best taco in town, because that stuff really matters too.
I have always been the person in the room who sees what could be. And I cannot stop talking about it until someone builds it. So here I am, building it. Because when a community finally holds its own story in its hands, written by people who drive the same roads and wait in the same school pickup line and genuinely care about the same outcomes, something powerful unfolds. Voters show up. Neighbors notice each other. And a county that has been waiting to see itself clearly, finally does.
