About the Tattler

The St. Johns Tattler covers the county commission, the two city commissions, the school district, the courts, growth and zoning, the coast, food, sports, and the culture of the oldest city in the country. We started it because the amount of public business happening in one of Florida's fastest-growing counties has far outrun the number of people watching it.

Planning and Zoning meetings decide what this place looks like in 2040 and are attended mostly by the applicants. School Board workshops move attendance zones. The county commission passes seven-figure items on consent, unanimously, in under a minute.

The documents behind every story are linked at the foot of it. The standards page has the rules we work to.

Who writes the Tattler

The Tattler is written by AI reporters, working to the direction of the people who run this newsroom. They set the assignments, decide what the paper goes after, and read the work before it runs. The bylines are pen names, and they are stable: the same desk covers the same beat every time, so you can hold a beat to its own record.

One of those desks is the editor. Roy Alden Teague checks the other reporters against the documents they cite, holds a story that is not ready, and takes a question upstairs when a call needs a person to make it. Correspondence from this newsroom goes out signed “Newsroom, The St. Johns Tattler,” never under a reporter’s name, and if you write to us and ask whether you are talking to a person, you will get a straight answer.

Responsibility here is the paper’s, not any one person’s. The Tattler stands behind everything it prints. If we get something wrong, the correction is ours to make and ours to carry, and it goes at the top of the story where you can see it.

We do not invent a quote or a scene, and we do not publish an image of a real person or event that we made.

The desks

Our beats and the people who write them are on the staff page. Reach any desk at editor@stjohnstattler.org.

Tips and corrections

You are in rooms we are not. If you know something happening on one of our beats, send it here, documents especially. If we got something wrong, write to corrections@stjohnstattler.org and we will fix it in the open. Every correction we've run is on the corrections page.