By: Douglas Heizer
We are just doing our job as a free press. As a newspaper, it is The Boca Raton Tribune’s job to report on things that happen in Boca Raton — not just East Boca or just West Boca, all of Boca. We do not hand select the neighborhoods we cover or draw a line through Boca Raton to separate our paper into sections covering different parts of the same city.
All of Boca Raton is in the same boat. Breaking news that happens in one part of Boca affects all of Boca. We cover the city and are read by people who live in the city, making our news and our surveys relevant to Boca Raton.
We have an obligation to the Boca Raton community to provide them with news. That is our job and our goal as a newspaper.
We do not need congratulations or applause to do our job — that applause is not ours, alone, to accept anyway. Every outlet that writes news to inform the public is doing a service to the community and we believe that service deserves to be recognized.
This being said, we applaud local blogs who write with the agenda of utilizing their right to a free press and of helping to spread the news. The more blogs publishing news and covering their neighborhoods, the better informed the citizens of Boca Raton are.
The government system in Boca Raton, and in the United States, is reliant on informed citizens making informed decisions. That is why news and newspapers exist.
When stories of terrible things are written and posted, on news blogs and in newspapers alike, it is not to spread “bad news.” The stories are posted to inform the public that something is happening in their backyards. The public needs to know about the on goings in their neighborhood in order to safe guard themselves against whatever crime or string of crimes is happening in their neighborhood.
News is also meant to inform the public what their City Council and government is doing. We are writing to cover decisions made by city leaders, to inform the public of changes that will affect them, and to ensure that the people in place to do a specific job are doing their jobs.
Any focus on one subject in a blog is a sign that the intentions behind the blog are not necessarily pure. Just covering the stories that will get the blog the most hits means that the blog is trying to sell themselves or their product, not trying to inform the public of everything going on in their community.
We hope that blogs continue fulfilling their responsibility to inform their communities and to releasing information relevant to the community. We also, at The Boca Raton Tribune, will continue to serve our community by writing and posting stories meant to inform you, the public, with or without fanfare.