Florida Politics

What you're reading

Florida Politics is a Tallahassee-centric political-news website covering the Florida statehouse, campaigns, lobbying, and the state's political class. It was founded by Peter Schorsch and operates as a daily political-insider outlet — the audience is legislators, lobbyists, consultants, campaign staff, agency officials, and reporters covering the same beat. It reads as inside-baseball political coverage rather than mass-audience news.

Format is web-first plus a heavy daily newsletter operation (Sunburn, Influence, Last Call) and event sponsorships. Ownership is Extensive Enterprises, Schorsch's private holding company. The site is best known for the daily Sunburn newsletter that lands in nearly every political inbox in Tallahassee, detailed campaign-finance and lobbying coverage, candidate-roster and race-rating analysis, and a sponsorship model that puts the names of major lobbying firms and consultants directly into the editorial product.

Ownership & funding

Extensive Enterprises (Peter Schorsch, independent). Funded primarily through ad-supported + sponsorships.

The ad-and-sponsorship model produces exactly the product Florida Politics is — a daily insider read funded by the people it covers. Lobbying firms, campaign consultants, trade associations, and political committees buy sponsorships, newsletter ads, and event placements, which is why the editorial product treats the political-influence industry as a beat worth covering on its own terms rather than as a target. That model rewards relationships, access, and reliability over adversarial accountability work, and it shapes the kind of stories the site does and does not pursue. It also means readers should understand the structural incentive: the operation is profitable because it serves the political class, not because it antagonizes it.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Florida Politics at Center with a factuality rating of Mostly Factual.

nwsly rates Florida Politics as Center because the daily reporting plays it straight on Republican and Democratic figures alike: campaign-finance filings, candidate moves, agency appointments, and legislative actions are reported as proceedings rather than framed ideologically. The site covers conservative and progressive policy actors with similar tone, partly because both groups are part of the audience and partly because the political-insider voice is structurally non-partisan — the readers want to know what happened, not how to feel about it. The editorial board, where one exists, is moderate and pragmatic.

Where the site breaks the straight-Center pattern is in the access-driven nature of insider political journalism: the framing tends to take the political process as legitimate on its own terms, accepts lobbying and campaign-finance behavior as normal background, and rarely steps into outside-the-process critique of either party. That structural posture reads as Center to most readers but as system-defending to political reformers on either side. The Mostly Factual rating reflects strong sourcing on campaign-finance and candidate news, good newsletter accuracy, but a thinner correction record than legacy-paper standards and occasional aggregation pieces that outrun the underlying reporting.

Editorial vs news side

Florida Politics blends news, analysis, and sponsored content on the same surface, with labels for the most explicitly commercial content. The Sunburn newsletter mixes reported items, analysis, and reader-facing commentary in a single product; reported campaign-and-government stories play straighter; sponsored placements are tagged but sit in the same visual register as editorial. Readers should treat the whole product as inside-baseball Florida political journalism rather than expecting a hard separation between news, opinion, and sponsorship.

Why we include them in nwsly

Tallahassee-centric statehouse and campaign coverage; reads as inside-baseball.

Florida Politics earns its State · Florida slot because it covers Tallahassee political-class daily activity — fundraising, lobbying registrations, candidate filings, agency appointments — at a granularity nothing else in the source set comes close to matching. It pairs with Florida Phoenix to give nwsly two complementary views of Florida: the insider-process view (this site) and the policy-accountability view (Phoenix). For Florida political coverage, that combination catches both the wiring and the policy outcome.

Recent nwsly briefs citing Florida Politics

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