A new communications policy, believed to be the first written communications policy in the city of Moose Jaw's history, was put forth at executive committee Monday night.

The policy also looks at its own social media and non-traditional media engagement, and because it was at executive committee it will be coming back to a future meeting of city council.

Councillor Chris Warren expressed concern about a line in the policy that said the city has the right to stop accommodating requests in cases where that media outlet continues to have false information, biases or a specific slant within their coverage.

“If it’s false information being reported, I can certainly agree with that sort of thing,” said Warren. “If it’s a slant, I mean, we can’t really control that. I would like to see that line be refined a little bit. Because I don’t want it to appear that we don’t want to communicate with the media if they take a negative view of the actions of the city."

“If they’re putting out false and inaccurate information, I’m 100 percent in support of us having a line on that. But when it comes to maybe a bias or a slant, I think we can soften our approach on that.”

Throughout the meeting, the piece that generated the most discussion was the issue of granting independent bloggers and websites the same kind of response time given to traditional media.

Mayor Fraser Tolmie said there has been a cultural change with an online presence.

“The traditional way of news media was that you would release information to a news outlet and they would report on it,” said Tolmie, who worked in sales at a media outlet in the city a few years before becoming mayor. “Now, if they got their facts incorrect, you would contact them and you would speak to an editor. And bloggers don’t have editors.”

Tolmie said there are no credentials and slanted coverage with independent bloggers and websites, versus that of traditional media.

“If we look at the city of Moose Jaw we have two media outlets that are paying city taxes,” he said. “Those reporters are accountable based on their hiring and their editors and their capability. These are important facts we have to look at in our communications policy and have discussions about.”

The new policy is also aiming for a 48 hour response time from the city for their services.