This weeks Folio features an article called Heavy Meddle, A Downtown activist gets too active for City officials. The article discusses the exploits of Kevin Conner, better known as Jax Investor, of the Metro Jacksonville message board. Basically Kevin makes requests for public information then he contacts people listed in the documents and asks them questions. All in an attempt to make the City accountable for their actions. Sounds OK, right?

Then this happened. Ron Barton caught wind of what Kevin was doing and got all pissed off:

I have now learned that Kevin Conners[sic] is calling people that he picks up in my emails, represents that he is a reporter and is inquiring as to their business with the City/JEDC. He is way out of bounds and beyond the pale on this one. I am going to ask the Office of the General Counsel if he has broken any laws.

What rights does a reporter from a local newspaper or TV station have that a citizen of this city does not have. Apparently they are not allowed to access public documents and ask questions about the information contained in those documents and they are not allowed to say they are “a reporter”. It seems if you are a citizen reporting the news you are held to a different standard and any other news organization in Jacksonville.

This city needs to wake up and realize that WE ARE THE NEW MEDIA. WE the bloggers of Jacksonville, WE the people who post comments on message boards and more so, we members of this community have a right to expose what is going on behind the curtain. I am talking about all of us, the citizens of this community. We have a right to report, publish and comment on any story that is news to us.

And guess what? We don’t have to play by YOUR rules. We are not the sanitized version of the news put out by the Times-Union or The Local Station. We don’t adhere to political pressure or old-school bureaucracies because we aren’t looking for a recommendation for our resume or a back scratch from a politician. We don’t have to watch our mouth for fear of offending someone, we say what the fuck we want.

Our news staff is 500,000 strong. We are the citizens of this city, we are the media. I wish our elected officials would pay the same attention to their constituents that they pay to one reporter from the Times-Union.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 7:30 am and is filed under Best. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.