Letters & Submissions Policy

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

The letters page is the community's seat in the record. The Contributor Terms carry the rights — no rights pass on submission, explicit acceptance, the publication license; this page carries the conduct that keeps the forum honest. Every sentence here is kept today.

1. The Forum

1.1. Letters and submissions exist so the community can enter its own record in its own words. We keep the page worth entering: real people, verified, arguing in good faith, selected for substance.

1.2. Disagreement with this publication is published by the same standard as everything else. A letters page that flatters its masthead is a mirror, not a forum, and we did not build mirrors.

2. Real People, Verified

2.1. Every published letter carries the writer's real name and community, and before publication we verify that the writer exists and wrote — or knowingly stands behind — the letter. The verification contact is part of the craft, not a formality.

2.2. There are no pseudonymous letters. A letter is public speech, chosen; the writer who needs protection from their own name is in Source Terms territory, and the rare safety case is the masthead's written call with the reason stated to the reader — the Sources and Anonymity Policy's discipline, applied to the forum.

3. Their Own Words

3.1. One voice, one letter. A letter is the writer's own position in words they stand behind. Ghost-written campaign mail, lobbyist-drafted letters signed by locals, coordinated form letters, and mass-produced synthetic mail all fail authorship by definition, and are declined when detected.

3.2. A letter-writing campaign is not nothing — it is news. We may cover the campaign as the organized act it is, with its organizer named; what we will not do is launder it through the forum as spontaneous neighbors.

3.3. A writer's tools are the writer's business, as the Contributor Terms say of every contributor. The test is not the pen; it is whether the position is genuinely the signer's own, and Section 2's verification asks exactly that.

4. Interests Disclosed

4.1. A writer's material interest in their subject runs with the letter: the candidate writing about their own race, the developer writing about their own project, the employee writing about their employer — each is identified as such in the signature line.

4.2. We ask at submission. Concealment discovered after publication is corrected on the letter under the Correction Terms, and the writer's future mail is weighed with that history.

5. Selection

5.1. Selection is editorial judgment exercised for substance: the strength and relevance of the argument, never its allegiance — the Contributor Terms forbid selecting for agreement, and this desk keeps that law gladly.

5.2. No writer owns the page: frequency is limited so the forum stays the community's, and the limit is applied evenly.

5.3. Rejection is final editorial judgment, not a correction matter; conduct complaints about the forum itself climb the Accountability Policy's ladder like anything else.

6. Editing Letters

6.1. Letters are edited for length and clarity, never for meaning and never for allegiance. An edit that could alter substance goes back to the writer before publication — their name is on it, so their yes is on it.

6.2. The headline above a letter is ours, carries the register of argument as the Opinion and News Separation Policy requires, and never sharpens the letter past the writer's own claim.

7. Facts in Letters

7.1. A letter may argue anything and may misstate nothing. Factual claims in letters meet the Verification Policy's floor: a claim we cannot verify is removed with the writer's agreement, or the letter is declined.

7.2. The letters page is in the record, so the record's machinery reaches it: a published letter's factual error is corrected under the Correction Terms, dated on the letter, entered in the ledger where substantive — the forum enjoys no exemption from the law of the house it speaks in.

8. Op-Eds and Offered Essays

8.1. The longer submission — the guest essay, the expert argument — runs under everything above, plus: the byline note states honestly who the writer is and why they are speaking, commissioned work is paid under the Contributor Terms, and the no-harvest rule holds in conduct as in law: a declined essay leaves whole.

9. The Permanent Page

9.1. A published letter joins the archive forever, as the Contributor Terms warn and the Archive and Permanence Terms promise. The desk says so again at acceptance, because a letter to the editor here is a letter to the future.

9.2. A minor's letter publishes with a guardian's consent and the Coverage of Minors Policy's adult-self test applied — the forum is open to young citizens, and the archive's weight is carried for them by us.

10. The Record of This Policy

10.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so the forum's law on any given day can always be checked against that day's page.

This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.