Opinion & News Separation Policy

The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/opinion-news-separation · Effective October 16, 2026

The Editorial Policy names the classes — news, editorial, opinion, analysis, letters — and rules that no work is two of them. This page is the wall that keeps it true: the practice, the personnel, and the presentation. Every sentence here is kept today.

1. The Wall Is a Practice, Not a Floor Plan

1.1. Separation here is kept by acts and records, not by seating charts: positions are formed and documented as positions, news judgments are made and documented against the evidence, and each can be audited against the other. The wall holds at any scale because it is built into the sequence of the work itself.

1.2. The editorial line is formed without directing news assignments, and news assignments are made without consulting the editorial line, as the Editorial Policy requires. This page adds the enforcement: the two judgments are made separately, recorded separately, and answer separately under the Accountability Policy.

2. The No-Preview Rule

2.1. Neither side of the wall clears the other's work before publication. News is not shown to the opinion function for approval, softening, or timing; opinion gets no advance look at reporting, and no editorial is scheduled off unpublished news.

2.2. The first reader of each side's work, outside the standard of verification itself, is the public. A wall with a preview window is a door.

3. Personnel Across the Wall

3.1. A hand that has taken a public position on a question does not report the news of that question. Position-taking is a form of conflict, and the Conflicts of Interest Policy's remedies apply: disclosure, recusal, or declining the work.

3.2. Movement across the wall is lawful and visible: a columnist may become a reporter and a reporter a columnist, and the archive — permanent as always — lets any reader see the history. What no one does is stand on both sides of one question at once.

4. Presentation

4.1. Opinion is visually and structurally distinct everywhere it appears: its own section placement, its own page furniture, its label at the work — in feeds, in syndication, in licensed copies, and in machine lanes, as the Editorial Policy's traveling-label law requires.

4.2. No opinion appears in news clothing and no news wears opinion furniture. An opinion headline carries the register of argument, never the voice of record: the reader who sees only the headline must still know a case is being made.

5. Analysis, the Slipperiest Class

5.1. Analysis is where most walls leak, so it gets its own discipline: evidence-bound, labeled, verified to the news standard, and barred from advocacy, as the Editorial Policy defines it.

5.2. The test is one question: does the work conclude what is, or what ought to be done? "Is" can be analysis. "Ought" is opinion, every time, and a work that drifts from weighing to urging is relabeled before publication — or rewritten until the test answers cleanly.

6. Off the Pages

6.1. A work is represented as its class everywhere we represent it: promotion, social cards, and syndication carry the opinion label with the headline, and our structured metadata never dresses opinion as news — the Signals Policy's honesty rule, applied to the share card.

6.2. Accounts this publication operates do not blur in a caption what the pages separate in law.

7. The Reader's Glance

7.1. A reader landing on any page of ours should know within one glance which class they hold — by the label, the furniture, and the section. That glance is this page's acceptance test.

7.2. A page that fails the glance — opinion that reads as record until the ninth paragraph — is a defect, reportable through the publication's published contact channels and repaired under the Correction Terms.

8. Outside and Syndicated Opinion

8.1. Outside columnists and syndicated opinion run as the labeled opinion of named writers, their material interests disclosed under the Conflicts of Interest Policy's standard for opinion writers.

8.2. Carrying an argument is not endorsing it — the page is a forum, and the Editorial Policy's endorsement rules are untouched by anything we publish over someone else's name. But the floor never moves: opinion's facts are facts, verified, correctable, and no byline rents immunity from the Verification Policy.

9. The Record of This Policy

9.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so the wall's law on any given day can always be checked against the work that day produced.

This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.