Joe Shea

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Joe Shea (February 7, 1947 – October 19, 2016) was editor-in-chief of The American Reporter, the first daily Internet newspaper, started on April 10, 1995.^[2] Shea was the named plaintiff in the landmark First Amendment case, Shea v Reno, which ended with the Communications Decency Act and its proposed censorship of the Internet declared unconstitutional in Manhattan Federal Court^[3] and affirmed in the U. S. Supreme Court in 1997. He is a noted community activist whose efforts to clean up a dangerous neighborhood in Hollywood, California were praised by authorities as a national model for Neighborhood Watch. His defiance of the Clinton Administration on the censorship law was featured in "A Day In the Life of The Internet".

Shea was born in Goshen, New York, to Mr. & Mrs. John S. Shea, Jr., of Monroe and New York City. His grandfather John S. Shea was elected Sheriff of New York in 1909, the first Republican to be elected in Manhattan since Reconstruction and the last until his uncle, William F. Shea, was elected to the bench in 1954.

Joe Shea also started the Committee to Draft U.S. Senator John Kerry which sought to get the Massachusetts senator into the 1988 Presidential race.