What we Publish
We are happy to publish news, events, announcements, and any other local information that is of interest and helpful to the local community.  It can encompass anything you might find in a printed newspaper, magazine or newsletter, including up-to-the-minute news.    We also publish business spotlight articles about local businesses in the area.  If you have a business that you would like us to write about, please contact us at spotlight@hometowntimes.com
 

How We Operate
Each Hometown Times news publication is a community center for local news, and is open to the public.  All submissions are received by local editors and reviewed prior to publishing.  Each site has a minimum of one editor dedicated to the site.  The editor and up to 3 journalists live, work, and play in the community.   

Additionally, we have a managing editorial staff that monitors the content placed on the sites, and manages the process of sharing content across multiple sites.   

Where We Get Our Content 
Our content comes from you.  When we all participate as a community, we all benefit.   Try as we might, we cannot be everywhere to cover every event that happens in the area, so we depend on you to submit announcements, press releases, and story ideas.   Additionally, we are happy to publish press releases and community information from official Public Information Officers of official organizations without edits.  We also canvas the web daily for news, blogs, and information that might lead to great story idea, but in the end its you, the community, that keeps us busy every day.

Editorial Policy
If you have something to announce, or anything to say, please send it to us at editor@hometowntimes.com and it will be published, subject to the following editorial guidelines:

HometownTimes is driven by public participation. It is where YOU can shine. We provide an outlet for you to reach a large audience in your town when you need it most. We freely accept content from everyone, and will treat all input with equal respect.

HometownTimes does NOT itself editorialize. We believe that bias already has a way of creeping into the news even when the writer has the best of intentions. For this reason, we do our best to avoid expressing any opinions of our own. Opinions expressed on this website are always opinions of our readers, not HometownTimes.com.

If you disagree with any opinion published on this site, the best answer is to submit an opinion of your own.  We will give all submissions equal respect.

Our intent is to serve our readers. If you can read this, this means you. We publish all contributions unedited unless we find the content objectionable, mean spirited, grammatically challenged, or well known to be simply false. If we do receive content of this nature, we will ask the author to edit the submission and offer suggestions, with the full intent to refine and publish.

Our policy applies to any entity, business or personal. We provide a level playing field, open to all contributors. Anyone is free and encouraged to submit content to the site, but nothing is published without our approval, to ensure we have a clean, informative resource for your area.

Our site is supported by advertising from local businesses. Submissions intended to advertise a business may be published at our discretion.

Although we reserve the right to refuse content for any reason. It is our ultimate goal to avoid doing so.

Tips on Submitting Content to Us - What we Can and Cannot Publish

• We can publish press releases, media advisories, and announcements that are free and pen content intended for the media to publish. 
• We can  publish options or “letters to the editor” written by you.
• We cannot re-publish articles from other media outlets.  They are the property of the publication or the author.  Those require permission, and if obtained, written authorization from the source should be included.

Writing 101 

Style, grammar, punctuation, and consistency are all very important to producing a quality publication.  We appreciate your best efforts to fit within the quality of articles that you see on the site today.  The less amount of time our editors need to spend “editing: your article, the more likely it is that it will be published quickly.

Here are some ‘Dos, and Don'ts:

• Do target your article to fall in the range of 100-300 words.
• Don’t use all caps.  It’s very hard to read words in all caps and doesn’t come across as professional.
• Do send pictures along with your articles. 
• Don’t over use the bold, underline and italics features.  It becomes distracting.  As a rule, through, italicize book titles, media outlets (magazines, newspapers, etc.) and movie titles. 
• Don’t use multiple exclamation marks and use single ones sparingly.

And once more, just to be crystal clear: Opinions expressed on this site are not necessarily those of the HometownTimes.com staff.