The Florida Press Association has announced the nominees for its 2026 Best Weekly Newspaper Contest, and the Osceola News-Gazette is well represented.
Your local paper received nine nominations for awards in news coverage, column writing, photography and website excellence.
The paper was also nominated in the General Excellence category, which takes into account the presentation of the entire paper over a series of issues.
The awards are for work done in 2025. The FPA will announce its first, second and third-place awards during the 2026 Florida Media Conference held June 5 in Lake Buena Vista.
The News-Gazette competes in FPA’s Division A among weekly/ bi-weekly papers with circulations above 15,000. Its editorial staff was nominated in Editorial Page for its Viewpoint page and for its website, AroundOsceola.com.
Among the individual nominations: Photographer Taylor McFee is nominated in the Sports Photo category, and for Feature Photo for images from the Silver Spurs Rodeo. Reporter Debbie Daniel, with contributions from editor Ken Jackson, is nominated twice in Breaking News for coverage of the Stephan Sterns sentencing hearing and suspended Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez’s arrest.
Kristin Hurst’s three-part series on the arrests made at county massage parlors earned a nod in In-Depth Reporting. Jackson, the former sports editor, was nominated for Sports Column for a piece on last year’s recipient of the county’s athletic Mike Fields Distinguished Leadership Award. He can win first place in the category for the second-straight year.
The News-Gazette has now racked up nearly 50 FPA nominations in the last five years.
“The way the public consumes our industry’s content is changing, but these nominations show we’re adjusting to it as well as any news organization in Florida,” Jackson said. “It’s a reminder, that's good to get sometimes, that our work reporting on and delivering community news is considered among the best in the state.”
