- KARE 11 won the 2026 Collier Prize for exposing a Medicaid fraud scheme in Minneapolis that led to major state reforms and program shutdown.
- The Collier Prize, awarded at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, includes $25,000 for the first-place winner and promotes state-level investigative reporting.
- Second and third place went to CalMatters and Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald for investigations leading to reforms and exposing public fund misuse, respectively.
For the first time in its history, the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability will be awarded to a television broadcast station this weekend.
KARE 11, the NBC television affiliate in Minneapolis, was recently announced as the 2026 first-place winner of the Collier Prize. The prize is administered by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (UFCJC).
“It’s a national award that recognizes the best work in investigative accountability reporting around state-related institutions,” Rick Hirsch, director of the Collier Prize, said in an interview with Mainstreet.
The award is considered one of the largest journalism prizes in the U.S. and is handed out annually to the top winner at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner in Washington, D.C. This year’s dinner will take place on Saturday.
Hirsch said this is the first time that the $25,000 first-place winner of the prize was a broadcast station.
KARE 11 won the award for its “Housing Hustle” investigation. According to a press release, reporter A.J. Lagoe and producer Gary Knox “exposed a massive fraud scheme within Minneapolis’ Medicaid-funded Housing Stabilization Services (HSS), uncovering forged documents, kickbacks, and criminal networks siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayer-funded Medicaid payments into fraudulent provider companies for services never provided.”
“The reporting drove sweeping state reforms and the largest Medicaid fraud crackdown in Minnesota history, triggering federal raids, indictments and the complete shutdown of the program,” the release said.
As the lead reporter and producer of the investigation, Hirsch said Lagoe and Knox will get to go up on the dais and accept the award at Saturday’s dinner.
Hirsch noted that Lagoe, who attended Syracuse University, was actually a student of Hub Brown, who is now the dean of the UFCJC.
“The world’s very small,” Hirsch said, noting that he didn’t know Lagoe was one of Brown’s students until everything was over with.
Hirsch said he feels having the Collier Prize announced at the WHCA dinner “elevates the profile” of the award.
“That is a pretty well-known event in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “It gets the Collier Prize out into a broader audience than just the local and state journalism community.”
In addition to the first-place award, there is also a second and third-place prize, with the winners receiving $5,000 and $2,500, respectively, according to Hirsch.
The second-place award went to CalMatters, a nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization based in Sacramento, California.
Calmatters’ reporters Robert Lewis and Lauren Helper won for their investigation “License to Kill.”
“The investigation revealed how California’s DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) is not required to investigate drivers who cause fatal crashes, exposing a fragmented system in which government officials routinely allowed historically dangerous drivers to remain on the road,” the release said. “The reporting series prompted widespread reforms, including hundreds of license suspensions and a wave of bipartisan legislative proposals aimed at overhauling how the state handles deadly drivers.”
Taking the third-place prize was the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald for “Hope Florida.” In this investigation, reporters Lawrence Mower, Alexandra Glorioso and Justin Garcia uncovered that the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis “orchestrated the transfer of $10 million in public funds to first lady Casey DeSantis’ pet project, the Hope Florida Foundation,” the release said.
The first, second and third-place winners of this year’s Collier Prize were chosen from among 110 entries submitted by news organizations from across the nation, according to the release.
The Collier Prize was established in 2019 through the support of Nathan Collier, founder and chairman of The Collier Companies in Gainesville. Collier is a descendant of Peter Fenelon Collier, who, in 1888, founded Collier’s, a weekly magazine focused on investigative journalism.
In 2019, Nathan Collier provided an initial gift to start the Collier Prize, and in 2024, he gifted $8 million to the UFCJC to sustain the Collier Prize and create a new local journalism symposium. The inaugural Collier Prize Symposium was held in November 2025.
“Since the beginning, the goal behind the Collier Prize has been to support strong, state-level reporting and the hardworking journalists behind it,” Nathan Collier said in a statement provided to Mainstreet. “Seeing that work recognized on a national stage is a meaningful reminder of why that mission still matters today, if not more than ever before.”
Nick Anschultz is a Report for America corps member and writes about education for Mainstreet Daily News. This position is supported by local donations through the Community Catalyst for Local Journalism Fund at the Community Foundation of North Central Florida.