About Us

Twenty-five years of telling the islands’ story

Longboat Key News is the independent voice of Florida’s barrier islands, covering Longboat Key, Lido Key, St. Armands, Bird Key and downtown Sarasota with journalism that answers to readers and no one else.

For a quarter century, this newspaper has done the unglamorous work that keeps a community honest with itself. We sit through the town commission meetings and the city hearings. We read the budgets, the bond documents, the site plans and the lawsuits. And then we tell you, plainly, what they mean for the place where you live.

We follow the big issues

When a landmark development fight lands in a courtroom, when a comprehensive plan quietly rewrites what can be built next door, when parking meters, public art or a utility assessment sets the town arguing with itself, Longboat Key News stays on the story until it’s finished, not just until it’s new. That watchdog work sits alongside everything else a real hometown paper carries: real estate, dining, health, the outdoors, letters from readers, the On Patrol police blotter, and opinion with an occasional, entirely intentional sense of humor.

Two newspapers, one newsroom

Longboat Key News and its sister publication, Sarasota City News, publish in print every other week and are delivered to mail rooms on Longboat Key, Lido Key and Bird Key, reaching readers where they actually live. Between print editions, the coverage never stops: new stories publish throughout the week here at lbknews.com.

An archive twenty-five years deep

Every edition we have ever published is preserved page for page and open to readers through the fully searchable Archives. It is a running first draft of the islands’ history: the storms and the seasons, the booms and the battles, the people who shaped these keys. Few communities of any size have a record like it.

Independently owned, locally answerable

Longboat Key News is independently owned and published by Steve Reid, who has called Sarasota home for three decades. There is no distant chain, no hedge fund, no corporate parent. The paper’s only obligation is to the readers and communities it serves, which is exactly how a local newspaper should work.