Jessica Bakeman
Director of Enterprise JournalismJessica Bakeman is Director of Enterprise Journalism at WLRN, South Florida's NPR member station. Bakeman oversees the station's new investigations team, and she co-edited the 2023 investigation Unguarded, examining the Guardianship Program of Dade County's real estate sales practices. Since joining WLRN in fall 2017, Bakeman has also served as senior news editor and education reporter.
Bakeman was the editor and project manager of Class of COVID-19: An Education Crisis for Florida's Vulnerable Students, a 2021 multimedia series from Florida Public Media exploring how the pandemic upended public education statewide. The project won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in digital.
In 2020, she was named journalist of the year by the Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Bakeman reported and produced WLRN's 2019 audio documentary and investigative series, Chartered: Florida's First Private Takeover Of A Public School System, which earned a regional Murrow for news documentary and an honorable mention for the inaugural Esserman-Knight Journalism Prize.
She won national first-place awards for audio storytelling in 2019 and education beat reporting in 2018 from the Education Writers Association.
Previously, Bakeman helped establish POLITICO's national network of state capital coverage, serving as an original member of the company's bureaus in both Albany, N.Y., and Tallahassee, Fla. She also covered New York state politics for The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Bakeman is a past president of the Capitol Press Club of Florida, a nonprofit organization that raises money for college scholarships benefiting journalism students. Also, she twice chaired a planning committee for the New York State Legislative Correspondents Association's annual political satire show, the oldest of its kind in the country.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism and English literature from SUNY Plattsburgh, a public liberal arts college in northeastern New York. She proudly hails from Rochester, N.Y.
She can be reached at jbakeman@wlrnnews.org
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The campaign includes $2 million for research on how e-cigarettes affect developing lungs. -
A combination of cyber attacks and software glitches have disturbed the first week of online classes for 275,000 students in district schools. -
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the child care sector. -
Student activists in South Florida who want to push police out of schools face what could be an insurmountable challenge: Parkland. -
Fedrick Ingram moved up from a local teachers' union to the statewide union and now to a leadership position with the American Federation of Teachers. -
The African and African Diaspora Studies program at Florida International University had been at risk of getting cut for years because of its tiny enrollment. Black Lives Matter changed that almost overnight. -
With state grant funding, the district hired 60 mental health specialists to supplement the services schools are able to provide. -
As COVID-19 clusters are popping up at universities around the country, some of which have already shifted online, the University of Miami is beginning its own experiment with in-person classes during a pandemic. -
Four incumbent school board members in South Florida are fighting to keep their seats on Tuesday, and at least a third of the Miami-Dade County School Board will turn over this cycle. -
The pandemic has changed this election in so many ways — how we vote, how campaigns are run, the experience at the polling station, even how you think about the U.S. mail. -
The race is one of several House Democratic primaries that political observers say reflect a national trend of young progressives challenging incumbent Democrats. The incumbent's challenger started his political career in high school. -
Broward County Public Schools has paused its weekly meal distributions, taking a weeks-long break from handing out free breakfasts and lunches to families…
