From its inception, Carson Now has been the place where anyone could submit stories, photos, opinions, etc. about local issues.
We can do this because the site has been engineered to have two tiers for where content resides. The front page offers a filtered view of the content on Carson Now, as determined by our staff based on what we feel is newsworthy.
Behind the front page, you can access all of the other content that is submitted that complies with our Terms of Use. You can find these stories via the search function, or navigating to the different categories under the Newsroom tab at the top left of every page. You can distinguish reader-submitted content because it has "reader-content" in the URL.
As we have grown from a tiny blog into the number one local news website in Carson City, we have tried to stick to this principle.
But with the new political season beginning, we realized that we needed to create a specific policy regarding political letters and press releases to make sure everyone is treated fairly.
We are maintaining our basic policy that we will publish online any content that is local in nature, or is from a local resident tackling a non-local issue, subject to our Terms of Use. In general, that means anything that's not obscene, illegal, abusive or detrimental to the site and our readers.
However, we will no longer promote reader-submitted content to the front page (or our Facebook or Twitter pages) that is either opinion based, or deals with political candidates or issues. Political letters, press releases and other similar content will still be allowed on the site as before, but will be located in the Opinion or Announcements sections.
We are doing this because we do not want to be seen taking sides, or favoring one candidate over another. We also don't want our front page to turn into a battlefield of press releases and political letters.
One small exception is that we will allow press releases announcing someone running for office, or dropping out of a race. In these cases, we will treat these like news tips to write stories about, based on our judgement of their newsworthiness.
We also foresee times when there will be information submitted in press releases and/or opinion pieces that we will judge to be newsworthy enough for further investigation. In these cases, Carson Now will be reporting and writing about these issues, and posting them as stories with bylines.
If anyone has any concerns or suggestions on how to improve on this policy, please let us know.
Thank you.