Katelyn Ferral

Katelyn Ferral is a federal politics and policy reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. Her work at the paper focuses on the impact of federal policy and politics on Florida and the Tampa Bay region.

She was previously on the investigations team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where her work was also regularly published in USA TODAY.

She has reported extensively on the military and veterans affairs on the state and national level. She was named a Livingston Award finalist in 2022 for national reporting for her investigative work on the National Guard and was awarded the American Legion's Fourth Estate Award for national reporting on the military the same year. She has also received the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi award for her work documenting abuses at a Wisconsin nursing home for veterans.

Investigations were also her focus at the Capital Times in Madison, Wis., where she wrote about mismanaged veteran nursing homes, scam PACs and a sexual abuse ring involving minors at a local church that led to changes in state law. She's also covered the energy industry at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review and local government at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.

Ferral studied Eastern European politics and the transatlantic relationship in graduate school and taught English in Ukraine in 2013. At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she reported from the Ukraine-Poland border for USA TODAY, documenting the refugee crisis and human toll of the war in its early weeks.