Ottawa mayor cancels policy blocking emails from city staff to journalists

Ottawa mayor Jim Watson has cancelled a city policy introduced this week that blocked most staff from emailing journalists directly.

Ottawa mayor Jim Watson has cancelled a city policy introduced this week that blocked most staff from emailing journalists directly.

Watson called it "a very bad idea," the CBC reported. "I just directed the city manager to stop that, because we shouldn't be blocking emails,” Watson said, according to the CBC. “We have a process in place where there are people responsible for being spokespersons and that's great but I don't think it makes any sense to block emails for anyone whether you are a journalist or a member of the public, so I said that's the end of that.”

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Watson said the idea was to restrict communications between the media to managers who have had formal media training, the Ottawa Citizen reported. The newspaper also said that email addresses of City Hall reporters were fed into the City’s email servers, so that messages sent to staffers could be received but they could not respond to the journalists. City Hall reporters were displeased with the policy.