Steve Myers is a freelance reporter in Tampa, Florida, and covered Katrina's destruction in Mississippi for the Press-Register (Mobile, Alabama). Starting in 2004, before Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, he wrote about hurricane preparation and the effectiveness of local building codes against hurricane winds. After Katrina, he reported on the federal government's effort to revamp flood maps in Mississippi and Louisiana, which led to his proposal for the Katrina Media Fellowship.
Myers preceded his Katrina fellowship with a Kiplinger fellowship at The Ohio State University. There he studied online journalism and produced a multimedia package about efforts by Christian conservatives to influence the 2006 Ohio governor's race. The package was published on the election news site for the Columbus Dispatch.
Myers broke major stories as a government reporter for the Press-Register. He revealed a municipal court's illegal practice of expunging court cases, which were unsealed after the Alabama Supreme Court sided with the newspaper in a public records lawsuit. Myers exposed the local sheriff's efforts to divert hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds, meant to feed jail inmates, into personal accounts. The sheriff was later convicted of perjury in a related case, returned the money, and was removed from office. Myers also reported extensively on sexual abuse by priests, and detailed how a convicted child molester changed his identity to become an assistant principal in a public school. Myers's reporting on the principal spurred a state law expanding background checks for all school employees. His work over five years at the Press-Register earned him several Alabama journalism awards.
Before moving to Alabama, Myers covered crime for the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina; labor and environmental issues for the Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail; and the 2000 presidential primaries for a website he founded. He graduated in 1997 from the University of Notre Dame and was a college graduate fellow at the Poynter Institute that same year. He is a native of Pickerington, Ohio.
