Advertising Policy

The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/advertising · Effective October 16, 2026

This policy states the present fact of advertising at The Massachusetts Times and the rules that bind any advertising before it could ever begin. Every sentence here is kept today.

1. The Present Fact

1.1. The Massachusetts Times carries no advertising. No display advertising, no sponsored content, no native advertising, no programmatic placements, no affiliate links in journalism — nothing on a reading page was paid to be there.

1.2. What funds this publication is stated plainly where it is true: the reader-supported lanes of the Subscription Terms and the licensing commerce of the Licensing and Reprint Terms and Machine Terms. Readers are the constituency; they are not the product.

2. Why This Page Exists Anyway

2.1. A reader should not have to trust our future mood. The rules below are law now, in advance, so that if advertising ever runs here it arrives already governed — and if it cannot run under these rules, it does not run.

3. The Firewall

3.1. An advertiser, should one ever exist, buys space and nothing else. No advertiser sees coverage before publication, shapes it, schedules it, suppresses it, or learns of it ahead of any reader.

3.2. Coverage of an advertiser is identical to coverage of anyone — same standards, same scrutiny, same corrections machinery — and the Conflicts of Interest Policy governs every intersection.

3.3. The firewall is the Subscription Terms' influence rule wearing its commercial face: no money of any kind buys the record, bends it, or buries it.

4. Labeling

4.1. Anything paid is labeled paid, at the unit itself, in words that need no training to parse — "Advertisement," "Paid for by" — never in euphemisms built to be skimmed past.

4.2. The label is part of the unit and travels with it: into the archive under the Archive and Permanence Terms, into syndication, and into machine lanes under the Machine Terms' provenance duties, exactly as the Editorial Policy's class labels travel.

5. No Native Deception

5.1. Paid matter never wears the costume of journalism. No advertorial dressed in our typography, no sponsored unit with a byline that reads as staff, no format whose success depends on the reader missing the label.

5.2. The test is refusal-grade: a unit that imitates the news so well that only its label rescues the reader is not labeled better — it is refused.

6. Sold Against the Page, Never the Person

6.1. Advertising here, if it ever runs, is contextual only: sold against what the page is about, never against who is reading it.

6.2. No behavioral targeting, no tracking pixels, no audience segments, no third-party auction of a reader's attention — and none of it is possible by architecture, because the Data Policy's reading lane collects nothing to target with. We built the publication so that the person-shaped ad market cannot be entered from here even by a weaker future hand.

7. What Is Never Sold

7.1. Political advertising is refused, permanently. This masthead does not sell its pages to campaigns, parties, or political committees — the Editorial Policy declined to endorse, and this page declines to rent what we would not give.

7.2. Also refused regardless of revenue: units imitating government or public notices, units for frauds and predatory schemes, and any unit whose acceptance would require tracking readers.

7.3. The governance surfaces themselves — this policy library, the terms pages, the corrections ledger, and civic-emergency pages — carry no advertising, ever, under any future practice.

8. Sponsorship and Underwriting

8.1. If institutional support beyond membership ever appears — underwriting, event sponsorship — it is governed by every section above: named in public, labeled where it touches any work, barred from the firewall's far side, and disclosed on the work it funded.

9. If It Ever Begins

9.1. Before the first paid unit runs, this page is rewritten to describe the actual practice, under the Terms of Use's thirty-day dated-notice machinery — never after, never quietly.

9.2. The sections above are the floor no rewrite may lower: labeling, the firewall, contextual-only, and the refusals of Section 7 survive any future adoption of advertising, and a change attacking that floor is the material adverse change the Terms of Use make loudest.

10. The Record of This Policy

10.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so what funded these pages — and what was refused — can always be checked for any given day.

This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.