NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- When it comes to reporting the general elections, this is not your daddy's newspaper. We are bold and aggressive. Anyone who knows us will tell you we are not afraid to ask the tough questions.
Asking the questions that voters want answers to begins Tuesday night at Oak Hill City Hall with three successive public debates: 6 p.m.
* Oak Hill mayor's race between Commissioner and Vice Mayor Linda Hyatt and Doug Gibson;
* 7 p.m. Volusia County Council dist. 3 race between former elected School Board member Deb Denys and New Smyrna Beach Commissioner Jim Hathaway;
* 8 p.m. Volusia County Chair race between Gulf War vet Jason Davis and former County Council member Carl Persis. Headline Surfer will hold a 5:30 p.m. meet-and-greet at Oak Hill City Hall and candidates for any and all races are invited as is the public, of course.
We decided to begin our debate season in Oak Hill because this city has a lot of issues: Multiple lawsuits involving the police force, which was disbanded a year ago; a lawsuit filed by the former clerk who was fired; a lawsuit filed by a city candidate for election in November; the city's financial struggles to provide essential services and on and on.
Gibson and Hyatt attended our July 21 debate at the Brannon Center in New Smyrna Beach where we held a day-long series of candidate debates -- eight in all -- and we promised them Oak Hill would get the media attention it needs and deserves.
We'll have more in the coming days on the Tuesday debates.
We also have two weekly shows as part of our election coverage:
* "The Roundtable," where we meet on Saturday mornings to talk about the big news stories of the week. The 45-minute discussion is videotaped and published during the week;
* "The Sunday Conversation" is our newest show where we interview a newsmaker on location and present it on the following Sunday.
We're adding an electronic calendar to our elections page. And we'll be placing items of note in our breaking news rotator at the top of the elections page.
Our two anchored political bloggers at the top of the page are Stan Escudero of Daytona Beach Shores with his blog, "The Guidepost," and New Smyrna Beach resident Ellen Darden with her blog, "Politics and Policies."
In addition, we have a team of bloggers who write about political issues among their various topics: "Musings" by Darlene Vann of Edgewater, "American Patriot" by Michael Visconti of Edgewater, "Reform Government" by Ed Connor of Ormond Beach, "Always Right" by Sally Gillies of Ormond Beach and "Lion's Den" by David "Daniel" Beilstein of Orlando.
Many of the candidates advertise with us because they know our online readership is strong and our stories are prominent in the search engines for Google, Bing and Yahoo, as well as in the Google News Directories every day.
We look forward to bringing you our brand of political coverage.