General policies
UPDATED Aug. 10: YourArlington exists to bring community news to our town in the most civil and even-handed way possible. We aim to generate conversation about important issues facing the town, both through letters to the editor/blog entries and comments on specific entries in Your View, the site’s blog. Comments on news stories are not activated.
While we welcome these voices, we also request that contributors join in our commitment to a civil tone.
To facilitate this goal and guide our decision-making, we have adopted several policies that are noted in this article and are also posted on the “About Us” page of our website.
Articles: Full-length articles will be considered for publication. Articles are factual reports that do not express or convey the opinion of the author. The information contained should be researched and verified to be accurate. Documentation of sources may be requested. Articles must be proofread for grammatical and spelling errors. Persons submitting articles must include their name, street address and telephone number or email address with a submission. Click to read the full Submissions Policy.
Community notices and event listings: Criteria for community notices and event publicity are included in the Guidelines for Submission.
Copyright notice: No portion of YourArlington may be reproduced without the express consent of the publishers. Please state whether your submission has been published before and any terms under which the submission was published.
Corrections: The site regrets any errors it makes and will publish corrections promptly after notification.
Disclaimer: The site disclaims all legal and financial responsibility for its errors or omissions in content.
Feedback: To reach us please contact:
Guidelines for Submissions: Click this link to read the full Submissions Policy.
Letters to the Editor: Criteria for letters to the editor are included in the Guidelines for Submission.
Online comments: Online comments are activated for blog entries, but never for news stories. Online comment criteria are included in the Guidelines for Submission.
Photographs: We will consider photographs for publication. We will not substantially alter photographs except as necessary for publication. Digital photographs are required and by strong preference should be in the .jpg format. Please contact the editor for submission of nondigital photographs. Persons submitting photographs must include their name, street address, telephone number and email address with each submission.
Privacy: We do not and will not release your personal information to a third party without your consent. However, we may share general information about how people use the website without identifying specific persons. Please see our complete Privacy Policy.
Protection of minors: We will limit the use of names and addresses where we deem it appropriate, especially as it applies to minors.
Announcements of events: Local nonprofits are invited to submit announcements of their events. Other community calendars are linked to from YourArlington’s Events page.
Connect with YourArlington
YourArlington welcomes input from readers.
Submission guidelines for articles or press releases, calendar listings and event publicity, comments on published articles, and letters to the editor are noted below. This policy will be updated as software capabilities evolve to allow the general public to submit news and opinion.
Submission categories
YourArlington accepts submissions in four categories:
- Articles or press releases;
- Calendar listings and event publicity;
- Comments on articles posted in YourArlington’s blog, aka Your View; and
- Letters to the Editor
Articles and press releases
Proposed articles and press releases may be emailed to
Calendar listings and event publicity
- The public is encouraged to add their events online at www.yourarlington.com/events
Letters to the editor
Letters to the Editor should be emailed
General policies for all submissions
Views expressed in blog entries, aka Letters to the Editor, are the individual writer’s views, not YourArlington’s.
Decisions about publication of blog entries/Letters to the Editor are solely at the discretion of the editor. YourArlington reserves the right to limit the number of comments, letters to the editor, event publicity and articles or press releases published on a single topic or by an individual writer.
YourArlington will not publish submissions that contain errors of fact, personal attacks, defamation of character or libelous/slanderous material.
Letters to the editor
Letters to the editor should be emailed to editor [@] yourarlington.com. They also may be mailed to YourArlington, P.O. Box 89, Arlington, MA 02476, but that is discouraged.
Whether and when to publish any such letter is at the editor's sole discretion.
Writers must include their full real names and verifiable contact information (street address and telephone number, or a valid email address) with each submission. YourArlington will publish the writer’s name, but not their contact information.
Letters must be no more than 800 words in length; the words will be counted, and this limit will be enforced. Please do not include charts or graphs; in rare cases, photographs may be included as a separate attachment if directly pertinent to the topic and if the photograph belongs to the author. Links -- including to another online site that may contain charts or graphs -- may be included within the 800 words of text, but the writer should verify that the link is working prior to submission. Letters to the editor may include calls to action or requests for support.
Submissions will be edited for grammar and clarity; when necessary, the editor will verify corrections with the writer before publication.
Writers referring to an article previously published in YourArlington should include the title, date and a link to that article.
For clarity when using Ph.D. or ‘Dr./Doctor’ the writer should note the named individual’s field of expertise.
Letters express the opinion of the writer only and are not the opinion of YourArlington staff, board of directors or advisory board
Publication of sensitive information and/or rapidly developing news stories
YourArlington is engaged in the publication of news stories affecting the residents of our town. As an established news resource for the town, the goal is to report accurately. From time to time, these news stories may include reporting on events that we deem to be unusually sensitive because of, for example, and not limited to:
- The urgency of the events (e.g., crimes, emergencies);
- People involved in the story are minors or might be minors;
- A story is developing rapidly and facts are incomplete; or
- A story is ongoing for a period of time (e.g, a townwide emergency taking place over two or more days).
YourArlington will report as clearly and impartially as possible about the facts of a story as they are discovered or made known through reliable sources. These resources include (but are not limited to) local and state public safety departments; the office of the Arlington town manager; officials speaking for relevant town boards and committees; and/or eye-witnesses.
Corroboration of details and events before publication will be given the highest priority in all instances.
If a story is “breaking” or “developing,” YourArlington will report only what it can confirm. We will not speculate on what may have happened or what will happen. If appropriate, we will clearly identify a story as “in development” when it is first reported, and we will update that story as new facts become available.
Careful consideration will be given to news stories involving people who are minors or might be minors (those younger than 18). Minors will not be named without corroboration from officials and/or the express permission of a responsible family member. Similarly, the type of incident (for example, where violence or crime is involved) will be considered along with its relevance to the town as a whole.
YourArlington is completely responsible for decisions surrounding what it publishes or chooses not to publish.
In an extreme situation, such as a compliance request from law enforcement, the voting board members may be consulted and/or called upon to monitor events and/or determine appropriate responses.
Police reports
Were you named in a YourArlington report as someone charged with a crime, according to law enforcement officials?
Were charges later dropped, or you were found not guilty following a trial?
If so, get in touch with the editor at editor [@] yourarlington.com.
For a story reporting new facts, provide proof of your claim.
If you have an attorney, have that person contact the editor saying when the case was decided, in what court (if applicable) and the reason charges were dismissed.
If you do not have an attorney, go to the police department or court where the issue was decided and provide the editor with a copy of the documents proving your claim.
This information will be published in a new story. The aim is to help clear your name.
YourArlington does not remove a report even if someone asks the editor to do so.
Even so, consider these points:
- After about five years, depending on the news value of the story (a matter of the editor's judgment), police stories are pruned from the site; and
- As time passes, Google's indexing places an older story lower in rankings, so the public is less likely to see it.
News stories based on police reports reflect, by the nature of the source, the police view of an incident. YourArlington reports the names of adults charged with a crime as part of long-established journalistic tradition.
Names of those under 18 years old are not reported, unless the severity of the crime warrants. Names of sex-crime victims regardless of age are not reported unless a victim wants to be identified.
YourArlington does not publish a photograph of a person charged with a minor offense.
Police departments, including Arlington's, routinely release to media outlets the names of adults arrested in a variety of matters. Of course, an arrest or a charge does not mean a person is guilty.
Unless the news value of an arrest warrants it, most media outlets do not have the staff to follow up on each arrest.
In cases where charges have been dismissed, YourArlington has a path for you to follow. Best to bring your plea directly to the editor.
Options that won't work include threatening a lawsuit or offering a bribe. In the past, an attorney who said he represented a man named in a YourArlington police report offered the editor money to remove a story. He made the offer twice. The editor declined twice.
Privacy policy
The editor of YourArlington acknowledges that we live in an increasingly wired world in which the kind of privacy we may have long enjoyed is changing in far-reaching ways. In the light of such change, here is what the site strives to do with respect to privacy issues.
YourArlington's editor believes the privacy of site users should be protected, but the nature of the site means that participants give up a small degree of their private lives. YourArlington is based on user-generated content. To pursue that aim, it asks users of the site to register if they so desire When users do so, information that they provide about themselves is retained on the site so that the editor may communicate them and so that the users who agree to do so, communicate among themselves. YourArlington's editor does not share personal information the site collects about users with outside parties, including news sources and advertisers. YourArlington does make periodic reports to the public about the number of registered users on the site.
Those who write for YourArlington are asked to use their real names as bylines. Pseudonyms are strongly discouraged and require the editor's approval.
Anonymity, false names
Those who use the comment links below opinion stories -- which may be anyone (not just registered users) -- are asked to use their real names.
News stories do not have comment links.
The editor allows comments only where opinion is published -- on Your View, the site's blog and the only place to express opinion.
The editor does not publish comments offered anonymously or with apparently false names. If you believe what you are writing, you should stand behind it with your real name.
The editor knows that there are situations letitimately calling for anonymity -- for example, an abused spouse who may want to speak out. Further, the editor welcomes tips and will ask for the tipster's name but not publish it.
In most cases, the full name of a source should be published.
In the past, when the site accepted advertising, advertisers employed third-party service providers that used cookies for tracking the performance of an advertising program. Beginning in late 2021, YourArlington became a registered nonprofit organization and therefore no longer accepted long-term advertising, and therefore it ended its contract with an ad-serving company, so this issue no longer applies.
YourArlington does not share, sell, rent or trade information with any party for promotional purposes.
Donor and financial transparency
YourArlington is committed to transparency in every aspect of funding our organization.
Accepting financial support does not mean we endorse donors or their products, services or opinions.
We accept donations, gifts, grants and sponsorships from individuals, families, businesses, organizations and foundations to help with our general operations, coverage of specific topics and special projects. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that operates as a public trust, we do not pay certain taxes. We may receive funds from standard government programs offered to nonprofits or similar businesses.
Our news judgments are made independently – not based on or influenced by donors.
We do not give supporters the rights to assign, review or edit content.
We will make public all donors who give $5,000 or more per year. As a news nonprofit, we will avoid accepting charitable donations from anonymous sources, and we will not accept donations from government entities, political parties or candidates actively seeking statewide or national public office. While we will accept donations from local elected officials, we will maintain our editorial independence. We will not accept donations from sources who, as deemed by our board of directors, present a conflict of interest with our work or compromise our independence.
We declare that no more than 15 percent of revenue comes from anonymous funding.
Sponsorship acceptability
YourArlington reserves the right to accept or decline any sponsorship it is offered.
YourArlington will decline to accept sponsorship messages that it knows or believes to be misleading, inaccurate, fraudulent or illegal or that fails to comply, in YourArlington’s sole discretion, with its standards of decency, taste or dignity.
YourArlington, like all quality publishers of original journalism, maintains a clear separation between news and sponsorship content. Sponsorship messages that attempt to blur this distinction in a manner that, in YourArlington’s sole judgment, confuses readers will be rejected.
Nonprofit advertising
YourArlington may accept short-term advertisements from local nonprofit and governmental entities.
YourArlington does not accept political advertising from candidates or advocacy groups.
YourArlington reserves the right to accept or decline any such advertisement.
YourArlington will maintain the same level of discretion and control for such advertisements as it does for sponsorships.
Policy established Feb. 8, 2008, and updated Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Major policy changes were approved by YourArlington's board in February 2022.
