Policies

Letters to the Editor & Op-Ed Policy:

The News-Letter encourages Letters to the Editor and op-eds as ways for members of the community to express their opinions in a formal manner (as opposed to online comments, which do not appear in the paper). The Johns Hopkins News-Letter reserves the sole right to edit all op-ed pieces and/or Letters to the Editor for grammar, clarity, accuracy and style. This applies to the body of the submission as well as its headline. Upon approval for publication, all op-eds and Letters to the Editor become property of The News-Letter. The News-Letter reserves the right to not publish any op-ed or Letter to the Editor for any reason, at the sole discretion of the Editors-in-Chief. All submissions may be published online as well as in the paper, and no anonymous submissions will be accepted. Submissions with factual inaccuracies will not be published.

Letters to the Editor are limited to 400 words, must address an article previously published in The News-Letter that school year, and must include the author’s name, email address and phone number. They should be sent to chiefs@jhunewsletter.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject line.

To write an op-ed, contact the Opinions Editor at opinions@jhunewsletter.com with a short pitch. The Opinions Editor will provide the writer with a word limit.

Submittal of an op-ed and/or Letter to the Editor acknowledges your acceptance of and agreement to these policies. Any questions about these policies should be directed to the Editors-in-Chief of The News-Letter at chiefs@jhunewsletter.com. 

Website Commenting Policy:

Comments posted on this website are fully moderated by The News-Letter. Comments are either approved or rejected and not edited except to censor profanity, and as they are moderated by staff, there may be a delay between the time you submit the comment and the time it appears on the site. This delay will be shorter during business hours.

The comments section of this website is intended to be safe space where you are encouraged to express your point of view. Please be civil, and please be respectful of other commenters’ viewpoints. The comments section is not a place to attack others or to promote an agenda but rather, to express your thoughts on an article or its subject and to engage in polite discussion with fellow commenters. We encourage you to post a comment under your real name in order to promote respectful, healthy discussion and to lend credibility to your viewpoint.

To be approved, a comment must be relevant to the article on which it appears. The News-Letter reserves the right to reject comments for any reason, including the following: it contains vulgarity, profanity, commercial promotion, impersonations; it contains speech that degrades others on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sex, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, or other classification; it makes a personal attack on News-Letter staff or other commenters.

If you feel that your comment was erroneously rejected, or if you would like to report an approved comment that was inappropriately moderated, please email managing@jhunewsletter.com with the relevant article, the commenter’s name, and the time or approximate time the comment was submitted.

Facebook Commenting Policy (can also be read at https://www.facebook.com/JHU.News.Letter/info):

The comments section of The News-Letter Facebook page is intended to be safe space where you are encouraged to express your point of view. Please be civil, and please be respectful of other commenters’ viewpoints. The comments section is not a place to attack others or to promote an agenda but rather, to express your thoughts on an article or its subject and to engage in polite discussion with fellow commenters.

The News-Letter reserves the right to delete comments for any reason, including the following: it contains vulgarity, profanity, commercial promotion, impersonations; it contains speech that degrades others on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sex, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, or other classification; it makes a personal attack on News-Letter staff or other commenters.

If you feel that your comment was erroneously rejected, if you would like to make us aware of a comment that should be removed, please message us on Facebook or email managing@jhunewsletter.com with the relevant information.

Statement of Copyright

All articles, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, cartoons, and other contributions submitted to The News-Letter, as well as photographs taken specifically for the newspaper, become the property of The News-Letter upon submission and are under its copyright. Articles cannot be reprinted or cross-posted online without explicit permission of the Editors-in-Chief, and permission to cross-post a full article may only be given under extraordinary circumstances.