We’re looking forward to introducing you to Norine Dworkin. Check out our conversation below.
Norine, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: What’s more important to you—intelligence, energy, or integrity?
I put a high premium on intelligence. You’ve got to have some smarts to pick up on what makes for good stories, then go down the rabbit hole to thoroughly report them. And then there’s what it takes to run a local news outlet in today’s hyper partisan media environment. There are people way smarter than me managing news organizations, like Megan Stokes who’s absolutely killing it at Oviedo Community News.
So while intelligence is yes, important, even more important is integrity. Because without integrity, there is no reason for anyone to believe anything you and your team reports and writes. Readers have to be able trust you and your news organization. And sources — the people reporters rely on to provide information, sometimes confidentially and anonymously — must be able to trust that you will use the information they provide in the appropriate way. Sources who provide confidential information have to be protected and shielded. Reporters have gone to jail rather than reveal their sources.
Apart from their essential reporting skills, integrity is all a reporter has. And we have never needed it more. A recent Gallup poll showed that American trust in media has reached a new low — just 28 percent of Americans said they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust that TV, radio and newspapers will report the news fairly, accurately and fully. Not surprisingly, the split is greater among party lines with just 8 percent of Republicans, 27 percent of independents and 51 percent of Democrats expressed trust in media.
At VoxPopuli, we follow four tenets in our reporting: accuracy, fairness, transparency and accountability. That means we don’t publish something unless we know it to be true to the best of our ability to fact check it. We report all sides of an issue and give everyone an opportunity to comment, even if it’s to say “no comment.” And if we cannot reach someone, we explain how we attempted to reach them so that readers know we tried. We leave our opinions out of the reporting and just present the facts. And just as we hold local leaders accountable, we’re accountable too. When we make mistakes, and we do, we correct them and put a correction notice on the article.
Something else we started doing since the summer to help build connections with readers in the communities we serve, is we have a booth at the Ocoee Community Market. We’re there now every month, talking with residents about who we are and what we do. We believe that when community residents know the reporters who are writing the news, they’ll be more likely to trust what we report and engage with us. I hand my business card out to everyone and encourage readers to contact me about what they see happening in their communities, tell me about coverage they liked or didn’t like and what we can do better. On our Facebook page, many of our posts have sparked lively, sometimes heated, debates. I welcome all discussion as long as it’s civil.
Corporate media has experienced a seismic shift within the last year, and it’s not a surprise that readers, viewers have lost trust, although as the Gallup poll shows, it’s been eroding steadily since the 1970s with a collapse after the 2016 election. But the silver lining is that this provides a real opportunity for independent, locally owned news, like VoxPopuli, which focuses on local government and politics, to help earn back that trust in news. We work at it every day.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Norine Dworkin. I’ve been working in journalism for 30 years now. That makes me sound really old, but people tell me I don’t look it, so I suppose that’s a plus.
I started in newspapers in South Florida, working for many that no longer even exist, like the Hollywood Sun-Tatler and the Miami News. But I also wrote for the Sun-Sentinel, the Miami Herald and other major dailies, like the Orange County Register in California and the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. When I moved to New York, I wrote for the Village Voice and many of the gay weeklies and too many magazines to count. I loved writing for magazines. And for 15 years I was a freelance magazine writer. If you could find it at the newsstand, chances are I wrote for them: Family Circle, Redbook, Marie Claire, Woman’s Day, Ladies Home Journal, Prevention, Reader’s Digest, Fitness, Shape, Parents. The list goes on. But unfortunately magazines didn’t. The advertising paradigm shifted, and magazines began to fold.
These days I run VoxPopuli, the independent news site covering the government and politics of West Orange County. (Interestingly, VoxPopuli is my second digital company. In 2013, I started the parenting humor blog, Science of Parenthood, with a cartoonist friend at the height of the mommy blogging trend. We spun off three books, one of which won a couple of awards and was translated into several languages. We were very big in Asia!)
VoxPopuli launched in 2021 after I read a story in another local publication about a fifth grade play at a local prep school. I remember thinking the only people that that could possibly interest would be the parents and maybe the grandparents of those fifth graders. I knew there had to be real news in our area. I was going to find it and report it.
We’re now in our fifth year, and we have reported on city commissioners who violated campaign finance and other election laws; local politicians who misrepresented where they live; a vice mayor who interfered with a local election; a town council that attempted to take private property from residents; a mayor who tried to impose his religious beliefs on his city; and a city commission that manufactured a case to oust a fellow commissioner disliked by his peers.
For our coverage, VoxPopuli was included among the New York Times’ picks for “local news worth reading” in 2023. We earned a 2024 Sunshine State Award, given by the Society for Professional Journalists, for criticism and commentary and reporter Andrea Charur was a 2025 finalist for our coverage of the State Senate District 13 election.
In 2023, the City of Winter Garden enacted media rules prohibiting reporters from asking questions of elected officials before, during and after all city meetings simply because the mayor didn’t like the questions I asked. When I ignored the rules, which several legal scholars and the First Amendment Foundation said were unconstitutional, the city tried to ban me specifically from covering city commission meetings. For a time I was “under investigation” by the Winter Garden Police for reasons that were never made clear nor was the outcome. That attracted media attention from the Orlando Sentinel and WFTV. Winter Garden is stuck with a law on their books that they can’t enforce and I continue to ask my questions.
I have requested several times that the city revise this law to strike the provisions against reporters. Freedom of the press is absolutely essential for a functioning democracy. And as we see press freedoms stripped away in an unprecedented fashion in the last year, from national and regional outlets alike, we have to point the finger, call it out and demand those constitutionally protected freedoms be restored.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: Who taught you the most about work?
The two top editors at the last magazine where I was a senior staff editor before I went freelance full time taught me the most — although probably not the lessons one would expect. These two women taught me how not to treat one’s staff. The two were master manipulators and experts at negotiating office politics, and after two years there, they’d reduced my self esteem to a pile of ash. At one point, I realized the editor in chief was actively head hunting my job out from under me — I read an ad for my job in the New York Times classified section. (This was before Indeed, Zip Recruiter and Glass Door). When I asked her about it, she admitted it was true and told me that if I received an offer from another magazine, I should take it. I realized the job was killing me and so the editor in chief and I stage managed a graceful exit. I left without another job but with 13 weeks severance in my pocket. In no time I landed a better job at Woman’s Day producing special interest issues for them.
I was about 30 then; I’m nearly 60 now. I’ve had a number of young women work for me at VoxPopuli. As I’m training them to be better reporters, I’m also sharing the life skills I’ve acquired to show them how stand up to power — whether that’s a politician or a boss. They see me sparring with the mayor of Winter Garden, refusing to yield my time at the podium in a commission meeting because he’s trying to shut me down so he doesn’t have to answer my questions and chasing after a former state senator to repeatedly ask him why he is lying about being the incumbent in a special election when he’s been out of office for years and the actual incumbent is dead.
We don’t pay as much as I would like to for stories, but when reporters go the extra mile or include pictures with their story, I pay extra so they get accustomed to asking for more at future jobs.
In all ways, my work style is to build our reporters up and show them that being treated well and with respect on the job is the expectation, not a luxury.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
The most important lesson: nothing worth having is comes easily and that the “overnight success” probably put in 10 or 20 years of training or toiling in some backwater before they had their breakout moment that you’re just hearing about now.
Struggling also teaches that you can survive failure, the world will not come crashing down. Its an important lesson to learn and it’s best learned young. Learning it in your 40s stings. I’ve seen it. I was fired from my first newspaper gig at age 17. It was an internship. And it was really the best thing that ever happened to me. It took me down a few pegs, taught me some humility that I sorely needed at 17. Because at 17 you think you know everything, which I imagine was very annoying for the editors I reported to. But I bounced back, landed another internship and did better.
Failing is how we learn. And that’s what I tell the interns who work for us at VoxPopuli when they get their first stories back, covered in comments with instructions to re-write them — if you knew everything, you wouldn’t be in school.
So success is wonderful, and I celebrate every success that VoxPopuli has. But you don’t want to rest on success. When you’re not afraid to struggle and perhaps to fail, you’re not afraid to try something new and see how it goes.
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What’s a cultural value you protect at all costs?
Diversity. Part of our mission is to amplify voices not traditionally heard in legacy media. And when VoxPopuli has hired the most talented people to work with, we have organically created a diverse team that naturally reflects and supports the communities that we cover, giving us insight into issues that we might not otherwise have. Our staff is Indian, Hispanic, nonbinary, LGBTQ+, white, Jewish, GenX and GenZ. As our staff has fluctuated, at times it has been predominantly Black. At other times, it has been predominantly female. That multitude of perspectives is part of what gives us our edge.
Everyone here is a “diversity hire” because part of the value someone brings to any role in our organization, apart from their expected baseline skills, is their lived experience within their community and that always translates into better stories for our readers, which is always the goal.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I suppose I am fortunate in that my parents always told me while growing up that I could do or be anything I wanted. And from the time I was maybe 6, it was clear that whatever I did, I was going to write. For a while, I thought I’d be a novelist, but I was eventually seduced by magazine journalism. I tell people that there is not much else I’m cut out to do.
With my outsize sense of outrage over social injustice and natural inclination to be skeptical of and buck authority, I’m perfectly suited to run a watchdog media site that seeks to hold local leaders accountable.
With age, also comes the confidence that I can’t be bullied or intimidated out of unflattering coverage and the knowledge that I have nothing left to prove.
I interviewed for a job once at a gay weekly in New York that I didn’t end up getting. This was during the early years of the AIDS crisis when people could still lose their housing if they were sick. It was a time when ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] was staging “die-ins” — demonstrations with huge crowds of people laying on the streets to symbolize the deaths from AIDS because of government inaction. I was asked in this interview, by the guy who later became editor of The Hollywood Reporter, if I could “change the conversation.” What he meant was at press conferences — would I be able to force leaders and politicians off their talking points to answer the questions weekly readers wanted to know.
I don’t know if I could have done that in my 20s, but changing the conversation, holding leaders accountable and advocating for First Amendment rights and a free press have been a guiding principle at VoxPopuli now that I’m closing out my 50s. It’s an attitude that allows us to be fierce and fearless in our reporting and deliver substantive, issue-driven stories to our readers.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://wintergardenvox.com
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/WinterGardenVox
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norine-dworkin-she-her-6593594/
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/WinterGardenVoxPop
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@voxpopulifearlessfact-base2527
- Other: Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/voxpopuliworange.bsky.social
