Megan L. Whitfield landed in Fort Worth almost by accident. In 2012, she was a general assignment reporter at the Waco Tribune-Herald when a tip about irregularities in a North Texas school district’s bond spending brought her to Tarrant County for what was supposed to be a two-week reporting stint. That investigation stretched into three months, resulted in the resignation of two administrators, and convinced her that Fort Worth was where she belonged.
What She Covers

Today, Megan serves as Senior Reporter at News of Fort Worth, where she focuses on education policy, municipal finance, and neighborhood development across the city’s diverse communities. Her reporting digs into how public dollars move through local institutions—from the Fort Worth ISD’s $1.2 billion budget to the intricacies of Tax Increment Financing districts reshaping the Near Southside and Evans-Rosedale corridors.

Career Highlights

Megan’s 2021 series examining staffing shortages at Fort Worth ISD—tracking how teacher vacancies concentrated in the city’s highest-poverty schools—earned her the Texas Press Association’s Katie Award for Education Reporting. Before joining News of Fort Worth in 2018, she spent four years covering Tarrant County government for KXAS-TV (NBC 5), where she developed a reputation for making dense budget documents comprehensible to general audiences.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and completed an Investigative Reporters & Editors data journalism workshop in 2019, skills she’s since applied to public records requests that have become central to her accountability reporting.

Fort Worth Roots

Though she grew up in suburban Houston, Megan has made Fort Worth home. She lives in the Fairmount neighborhood with her husband, a physical therapist at Cook Children’s, and knows the Magnolia Avenue restaurant scene perhaps too well. She believes local journalism works best when reporters stay long enough to understand a community’s institutional memory—who made which promises, and whether they kept them.

Stay Connected Reach Megan at:
Megan@newsoffortworth.com