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. 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 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. Journalism Joe Shea started out in journalism by covering the 1968 New York City riot the night of the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., submitting his first article in longhand to the Village Voice where it was selected by editor Ross Wetzsteon over 18 other submissions from New Left writers including Dave Dellinger and Michael Harrington. He worked for the Village Voice as a freelance war correspondent in Northern Ireland, India, Vietnam and the Philippines, and was responsible in 1976 for the withdrawal of President Gerald Ford's nomination of Patrick Delaney to the Securities Exchange Commission after the Village Voice published his article revealing inconsistencies in Delaney's resume. Shea also wrote an article linking Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York, to a Bolivian diplomat, Victor Andrade, whom the U.S. Office of Strategic Services had identified as a "front for Nazis" in the cabinet of Bolivian President Paz Estenssoro. He later worked on the staff at Esquire Magazine, where he was responsible for a suggestion that became a regular feature of the magazine called "Reckless Advice", which became a book by Lee Eisenberg. Shea rolled a coin across his fingers on both hands while tap-dancing