Coverage of Minors Policy

The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/coverage-of-minors · Effective October 16, 2026

Children appear in the news because the news happens to communities, and communities contain children. This page states the extra care a child is owed by a publication whose archive is permanent. Every sentence here is kept today.

1. The Principle

1.1. A child cannot weigh the lifetime cost of publicity, and our record never forgets — the Archive and Permanence Terms promise that. So the two facts are joined into one rule: what enters the record about a child is decided as if the child's adult self were in the room, reading it with us.

1.2. Where any provision of this page is arguable in application, it is read in the child's favor.

2. Interviews

2.1. Interviewing a minor requires both consents: a parent's or guardian's, and the child's own willingness. Either no is a no.

2.2. The routine public exceptions are narrow and honest: an older teen speaking in public civic life — the student leader at the podium, the athlete after the game — is participating in public on purpose, and may be interviewed in that context without ceremony. Identification is still weighed under Section 3.

2.3. We never approach a child to get around an adult who said no, never interview by deception — the Journalism Policy's identification rule is absolute here — and we enter schools through the front door.

3. Naming

3.1. In honor and in the ordinary — achievements, sports, scholarship, the fabric of local life — minors are named with family consent, because being celebrated by name in the local record is one of childhood's good inheritances.

3.2. In adversity — tragedy, victimization, family catastrophe — minors are presumptively unnamed, and the presumption strengthens with the gravity of the harm. The story can almost always be told whole without the name; when it cannot, the masthead decides under Section 8.

4. Minors and Crime

4.1. A minor accused of a crime is presumptively not named. The single lane past the presumption — a minor charged as an adult, in a matter of gravity, where naming serves community safety or the record's integrity — is a masthead-level decision, made against this page and the Crime and Naming Policy together.

4.2. A minor victim of crime is not named. A minor victim of a sexual offense is never named, in any work, under any circumstance, with no masthead override — this line has no exception process because it must not have one.

4.3. Minor witnesses are not named. A child should not inherit, from our pages, the enemies of what they happened to see.

5. Imagery

5.1. Featured, identifiable imagery of a child carries the consents of Section 2. Children visible in genuinely public scenes — the parade, the stands, the fair — are the ordinary life of photojournalism and need no ceremony.

5.2. We do not publish identifiable imagery of a child in degradation, in grave suffering, or in victimization. The record of such events is made without conscripting the child's face into it, and the Imagery and Provenance Policies' craft rules apply on top of this page, never instead of it.

6. The Archive Ages With Its Subject

6.1. Our archive is permanent, so childhood coverage outlives childhood. A person who appears in our record as a minor may, as an adult, ask us to revisit the work's handling, and the request is heard with the archive's full weight acknowledged.

6.2. The remedies are the Record Policy's honest ones: annotation, the later chapter added, context in daylight — and where safety is genuinely at stake, the withdrawal grounds of the Archive and Permanence Terms already answer. What the request cannot be is erasure for embarrassment; what it will always be is heard, answered with reasons, and never resented.

7. Routine Childhood Is Not News

7.1. A child's ordinary mistakes — the school discipline, the social-media moment, the lapse every childhood contains — are presumptively not the record's business, absent genuine public significance.

7.2. Virality is not significance. A child trending is not a child newsworthy, and this publication does not launder the internet's appetite into coverage. The test is whether the record needs it, and the record has never needed a twelve-year-old's worst afternoon.

8. The Decision Seat

8.1. Every judgment call under this page — naming in adversity, the Section 4.1 lane, featured imagery, adversity coverage itself — is the masthead's decision, taken against this page in writing before publication, like an anonymity grant under the Sources and Anonymity Policy.

8.2. A failure is corrected under the Correction Terms with this page's protective reading, and the correction may include un-naming: removing a child's name from a served work is a repair this page authorizes, with the change annotated as the Record Policy requires.

9. The Record of This Policy

9.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so the care a child was owed on any given day can always be checked — including by that child, grown, reading their own archive.

This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.