Content Guidelines
Content and Community Guidelines
The Content and Community Guidelines of the Pelham Examiner serve our readership by providing rules for commenting on the Pelham Examiner website and e-newsletter and submitting letters to the editor and opinion pieces to the paper.
Tenets:
1. The Pelham Examiner intends for its owned and operated spaces to foster healthy, thought-provoking discussion and freedom to express opinions through online comments, op-eds and letters to the editor as well as the capability to provide relevant information to the community.
2. All online comments to the website are reviewed by the editorial staff before publication. When submitting a comment to the website, a reader must provide their first and last name and email address and confirm their email address by clicking the link they will receive. Comments should be kept on topic to the article being discussed unless the author has asked for suggestions.
3. Letters to the editor and opinion columns (op-eds) are edited for style and to ensure they follow the Pelham Examiner’s community guidelines. Facts and opinions presented in letters to the editor and op-eds are the sole responsibility of the authors. Authors of op-eds and letters must provide their first and last names and email addresses. Letters to the editor also require a physical mailing address for confirmation purposes. We do not accept letters to the editor that are in the form of a petition; that is, those signed by several, dozens or hundreds of people. The letters page is the people’s page where individuals get to have their say.
4. The Pelham Examiner is open to debate and dissent, but personal attacks or trolling of individuals in the community or on the Pelham Examiner staff will not be tolerated in comments or letters to the editor. Comments and letters that include name calling, whether addressed at individuals or groups of people, will not be published. This includes, but is not limited to, attacks based on race, religion, gender and sexuality and ethnicity. The Pelham Examiner staff will determine if and when comments are published.
5. Corrections: If a reader finds an error in an article written by a member of the newspaper’s editorial staff, they may alert the Pelham Examiner by emailing pelhamexaminer@gmail.com. The request for a correction will be reviewed by an editor with the reporter who wrote the article. If the error is confirmed, the news article will be corrected as quickly as possible.
6. If a reader has a question regarding the content of an article, they may email pelhamexaminer@gmail.com, and a member of the editorial staff will get back to them as soon as possible.
Editorial Mission
The Pelham Examiner seeks to cover the broad range of issues and developments that are of public concern or of interest to the residents and community members of the Town of Pelham. The Pelham Examiner supports unequivocally a free press as a bulwark of democracy, as it is critical to the paper fulfilling its responsibility to inform citizens. The newspaper seeks to give all the chance to have their say in letters to the editors, opinion columns and online comments.
The Pelham Examiner reports on the meetings of the Pelham Town Council, the Village of Pelham Board of Trustees, the Village of Pelham Manor Board of Trustees and the Pelham Board of Education. We cover breaking news, entertainment, local businesses and nonprofits, local residents of interest, sports and obituaries and publish press releases and announcements from a wide variety of organizations in Pelham.
Tenets:
1. The Pelham Examiner is written in clear, concise and understandable English.
2. Its staff-written news stories are unbiased and delivered in a neutral point of view.
3. We seek to omit no facts of major importance.
4. Unless it’s an op-ed or entertainment review, a story will not contain the personal opinions of the reporter.
5. Every bylined article will be copy edited before being published.
6. Obscenities will not be used unless essential to the story’s meaning and approved by the Executive Editor and the Executive Director.
7. We publish press releases and announcements as we receive them, though make no promise as to how quickly a release will run. Press releases do not receive bylines and include a prominent editor’s note noting the organization that provided the release and that it is appearing unedited in the form submitted. However, all releases are reviewed to ensure they meet our community standards.
8. We will not allow censorship of our content and generally decline requests for removal of any information from articles or requests for the removal of an article altogether. However, if a reader finds an error in a news story, they can alert the Pelham Examiner by emailing pelhamexaminer@gmail.com or by leaving a comment in the article. If the error is confirmed, it will be corrected as quickly as possible. If we are notified an article or part of one is plagiarized, the Executive Editor and Executive Director will review the material in question and remove it if it has been taken from another source.
9. All articles and other content on the Pelham Examiner, unless otherwise noted, are the property of The Hudson Valley Local News Lab Inc, owner of the Pelham Examiner; they are protected by copyright.
Editorial Code of Conduct
The Pelham Examiner has a Code of Conduct for all journalists on the staff. The Code of Conduct defines expectations for how staffers will conduct themselves when representing the Pelham Examiner.
Tenets:
1. Writers must not misrepresent their identity when reporting on a story.
2. Writers and editors must refrain from including personal opinions in the news articles they write and edit.
3. Reporters and editors will follow the Associated Press Stylebook when writing and copy editing stories, along with any specific guidelines set by this paper.
4. Obscenities will not be used unless essential to the story’s meaning. Such use must be approved by the Executive Editor and Executive Director.
5. Every article will be thoroughly copy edited before being published.
6. The use of anonymous sources must be approved by the Executive Editor or the Managing Editor and will generally only be permitted when there is no other way to get the information in question and the source requires protection from exposure for some valid reason. In some cases, as with Zoom transmissions of public meetings, it is not always possible to obtain the names of residents who make public comments. Reporters will do their best to provide as much identifying information as possible.