The Invading Sea was founded as a collaboration between the editorial boards of The Sun Sentinel, Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald, with Miami-based public radio station WLRN serving as a news partner. Rosemary O’Hara, then opinion page editor of The Sun Sentinel, proposed the idea and coaxed her husband, Tom O’Hara, a veteran newspaper editor, to edit the site.
The Invading Sea was unique at the time because news organizations that normally competed not only agreed to share opinion content, but to coordinate the publication of editorials. The Invading Sea won the Burl Osborne Award for Editorial Leadership, a national honor awarded annually by the News Leaders Association, along with other state and national awards. Its media partners eventually expanded to include 25 daily newspapers across Florida.
After Rosemary O’Hara retired from The Sun Sentinel in 2021, she joined her husband in editing the site. The couple later decided it was time to retire from editing the site and that Florida Atlantic University would have the resources to grow the mission of the collaborative, especially around education.
In 2023, the O’Haras donated the site to FAU’s Center for Environmental Studies, which at the time was under the leadership of Dr. Colin Polsky, a professor of geosciences at FAU. The site continues to feature pieces published by its media partners, while expanding the amount of original content that it publishes.
