As Florida Gulf Coast University’s academic year comes to a close, we reflect back on the first year of the university Journalism program’s “Democracy Watch” initiative. It’s a collaboration between FGCU’s Journalism BA program and the WGCU-FM news team designed to give exceptional upper-level students real-world experience reporting in the field while also enhancing and expanding WGCU’s coverage of important local government actions that often go overlooked and unreported. We reflect back on this first year of the program with members of the inaugural class of “Democracy Watch” fellows.