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. We intend to sit through the meetings, read the packets, and follow the cases to the end.

How we report

Every factual claim we publish is tied to a primary source, a public record, a document, a dataset, or a named person on the record. At the bottom of our stories you'll find the documents we built them on, linked, so you can check our work against the record yourself. If our story and the document disagree, the document wins, and we want to hear about it.

We hold the standards on our standards page: charged is not guilty, we follow cases to their disposition, we scrutinize public figures rather than private individuals, we ask before we publish, and our corrections are permanent and public.

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.