In 2005, years before anyone said “citizen journalism” with a straight face, Antonio French started showing up to St. Louis political meetings that no TV crew bothered to cover — aldermanic hearings, school board sessions, ward endorsements, candidate forums — with a camera and a simple conviction: the public deserved to see its government working, unedited and unfiltered.
The workflow was pure scrappy invention. Go to the meeting. Record it. Upload raw video in near real time — on 2006-era connections. Then cut the story together in iMovie on an old Mac, write it up, and hit publish. More often than not, PubDef had the story online while the legacy newsrooms were still deciding whether to send anyone at all.
One man, one camera, an old Mac running iMovie — and the story was up before the evening news.
PubDef became one of the first political blogs anywhere to build its reporting on YouTube — more than 500 videos of Missouri politics when that was a radical idea. The establishment noticed. When a local TV station tried to knock PubDef’s YouTube account offline with a copyright claim in 2007, French fought the takedown and won — all 500 videos restored. David 1, Goliath 0.
PubDef wasn’t a one-man show for long — it became a launching pad. French hired and trained a crew of young people as interns, junior reporters, and photographers, handing them cameras and press credentials when no legacy newsroom would return their calls. They learned the trade the PubDef way — show up, hit record, get it right, publish first — and many went on to bigger things in journalism, politics, and media. For a generation of young St. Louisans, this scrappy blog was their first newsroom.
PubDef went quiet in late 2008 for the best possible reason: the blogger crossed over. After more than 1,200 stories, national TV quotes, and proof that one determined citizen with cheap tools could hold a city accountable, Antonio French was elected Democratic Committeeman in 2008 — and by March 2009, Alderman of St. Louis’ 21st Ward. The watchdog had become one of the watched, and you can’t be both.
But office didn’t keep the camera out of his hands. When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson in August 2014, French picked it up again — this time an iPhone — and became the nation’s eyes on the street, documenting the protests night after night on Twitter and Vine, even capturing his own arrest on camera. He later cut that footage into the documentary #Ferguson.
And inside City Hall, he wrote the PubDef ethos into law — literally. As alderman, French sponsored and passed Ordinance 69707 (2014), the Transparency in Government law that created the official City of St. Louis YouTube channel and required every public meeting of the Board of Aldermen to be recorded and published online. In 2016 he strengthened it with Ordinance 70321, requiring video of every meeting — passed 22–0. So the next citizen wouldn’t have to bring their own camera.
He served two terms at City Hall, was elected a Missouri delegate for Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and served as her campaign’s deputy communications director in Missouri — before coming full circle, back to journalism at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. PubDef is where it all started.
This site disappeared from the web for years. In 2026 it was painstakingly reconstructed — all 1,456 stories — from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and Common CrawlCommon Crawl’s 2008 snapshotsrsquo;s snapshots. What you read here is the real thing, as it ran.