Riviera Beach residents crowding a recent city council meeting ranged from the usual to the unusual.
The usual: the politicians on the dais, the elders upset at them, the bored-looking cop, the local gadfly wearing his cowboy hat.
The unusual: the five reporters and their editor seated near the front row.
They were unusual because Riviera Beach, like many U.S. cities, has seen a marked decline in quality, local news coverage, and journalists doing that work are scarcer than ever.
Not to mention, the reporters were high school students.
Part of Stet News’ “Community Voices” program, the students from Inlet Grove Community High School were trained and paid (yes, paid) to cover the city that they live in: Riviera Beach. Stet News is a WLRN news partner.
Since joining last year, 16-year-old Mikala Graham said she has learned a lot, like the importance of sticking to the facts.
“It's kind of hard to not include your opinion on certain things, but I feel like, now that I'm doing it, it’s very impactful,” the junior said.
Started in April 2025, Community Voices was modeled after Chicago’s “Documenters” program, where adult community members are paid to write about city meetings that otherwise would go unnoticed.
Both Community Voices and Documenters responded to the local news crisis in the U.S. Today, millions of Americans live in counties with no or limited access to local news, according to the Local News Initiative through Northwestern University.
Liz Capozzi is one of Stet’s co-founders and helped kickstart Community Voices. She said they pay the students $200 a month, train them on civics and journalism, and assist them in authoring stories for Stet’s website.
“This initiative is about more than mentoring students,” Capozzi said. “We’re asking them to show up professionally and to produce professional work. And we’re setting a standard for civic journalism that tells the community we’re changing how local news operates in Palm Beach County.“
Kelvin Verhovlyak, 16 and an aspiring filmmaker, said he never thought about journalism before the program. Now, the junior shoots photos at city meetings that are used in Stet articles. He recently won a second-place award in a competitive, local nature photography contest; he entered it at the encouragement of his editors.
“It’s also just a whole bundle of new opportunities,” Verhovlyak said of the program.
The local paper's decline
The county’s local newspaper, the Palm Beach Post, once employed dozens upon dozens of reporters countywide and provided robust coverage of Riviera Beach.
The Post began in 1916. It thrived, with staff members named as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and countless other journalism awards.
In 2008, the Great Recession and cutbacks initiated by owners Cox Enterprises caused hundreds of reporters to be laid off, bought out or to otherwise leave the Post and its sister paper, the Palm Beach Daily News.
In 2017, the papers were sold to Gatehouse Media, controlled by a private equity firm known for squeezing newspapers for profits.
In 2019, Gannett, of USA Today, merged with Gatehouse to become the largest newspaper chain in the country. That was made possible by private equity and a lot of debt.
“At The Post, salaries were frozen. Positions were left unfilled. Reporters were paid below-rock-bottom wages,” former Post investigative reporter Pat Beall wrote in 2023.
Many staffers left over the years, while the reporters who stayed have seen their responsibilities increase. In 2020, the paper’s staff unionized.
A few of the editors who left founded Stet News three years ago. The digital-only outlet has pledged to cover as much of the county as they’re able — right now, from Lake Worth Beach up to Jupiter.
Who, what, where, why, and when?
The teenage reporters have written numerous, granular stories about Riviera Beach government — stories that were once the bread and butter of daily newspapers.
Their articles include topics like the rollout of a bus program, a costly water treatment plant and how advisory boards get picked.
Riviera Beach’s thorniest stories are still handled by the adult journalists, like the FBI investigation into the city and the firing of its city manager.
Myles Whigham, 17 and a junior, said he’s learned about his own community throughout the program, such as Riviera Beach’s plans to turn a waterpark five minutes from his house into a new police station.
“I used to swim there as a kid,” he said, “I wouldn't have known that it was getting torn down if I didn't go to these meetings.”
The students are helped by mentors Capozzi and C.B. Hanif, who is Inlet Grove’s journalism teacher. Hanif also spent more than two decades at the Post.
During an article-writing session in April, he encouraged the writers as they struggled to come up with a succinct “lede” into a story about Riviera Beach’s nomination for a national award.
“Editorial writing is the art of knowing what to leave out,” Hanif told them, “Because you got all this stuff and you're trying to distill it into a comment to tell readers you know, what it means, why it's important, what should happen.”
'Opens the doors'
Whigham and Verhovlyak said they genuinely liked learning about how their city government worked.
“ When we went to a meeting once, we waited 20 minutes just for them to cancel it immediately, which didn't feel that good at all,” Whigham said, “‘Cause like we were excited for it and they canceled it like out of the blue.”
I asked the students how they spent their monthly pay.
One said he is saving up to upgrade his camera gear, while another said her dad is helping her invest. A third said he used the money to help pay for groceries for his family.
As young reporters, I wanted to know what they thought was the future of news, and how — or if — they could get their peers interested in civics and journalism, like them.
“ I feel like at this point, like journalism is more through social media. It's not even through articles or, for example, the New York Times,” Verhovlyak said.
The Times, “ you can just post it up in the museum,” Verhovlyak continued, met with laughs from his colleagues and classmates.
Graham said she does not go out of her way to find a news site’s homepage or read an article. Her peers feel the same way, she said.
“ I'd rather like watch a video that explains it, and it's interesting. So I do feel like if we do things like that, they'll be more interested in it, but we have to promote it properly,” Graham said.
Whigham said people today “ have issues reading things,” which is why they don’t go to news sites, compared to older generations who used to pick up daily newspapers.
His idea: “As long as they get the information (in) a different way from reading …. We could even use new slang. Just something to get them interested and attached where they're picking up information without them really realizing it.”
One thing all the reporters agreed upon was how Community Voices allowed them to produce work and meet people they never considered before.
“Journalism as a whole opens the doors for a lot of opportunities for us because I know that once I got into Stet News,” Graham said, “I've been having so (many) opportunities to get my name out there.”
Verhovlyak agreed.
“ It's not like we sit there every single day just writing news. Even though that is important. But we do a lot of other fun stuff to expand our worldview,” he said. “It gives us topics to write about … interesting topics the readers may want to dive into.”
