For those following the saga of Claire Robertson of the IW council’s communications department removing VentnorBlog’s access to the Council, you’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve received an email inviting us to a meeting with herself and the interim Chief Executive, David Burbage (will he be starting ‘Burb’s Blog,’ in the vain of Joe Blogs, we wonder?).
BTW – Since being cut off, we’ve been heartily encouraged by the messages of support from a wide range of people, including IW councillors, many of whom questioned if it was even legal for a council to refuse to deal with a publication.
You might remember when we wrote about being cut off, we said that we’d be happy to meet with the Press Office, on the condition that the meeting was recorded.
Sadly, Ms Robertson has informed us that she feels it is inappropriate for the meeting to be recorded.
Staying true to our word, we wrote back to Claire last Friday, informing her that we couldn’t meet unless we can record the meeting – we’d given our word to our readers and we weren’t going to break that.
We’re not sure why she is so reluctant. The Council have said that they’d like to be more transparent and what better way to illustrate this than recording this meeting?
Oh … and there’s the small issue that they’re called the communications department. Quite why a communications department wouldn’t want to communicate has us scratching our heads.
We hope they have a change of heart and we’ll let you know once we hear back.
Image: M. Keefe
