News Tribune

By submitting your post in the News Tribune Forum, you are hereby authorizing the News Tribune Co. to publish content and or your name in conjunction with the original story. The News Tribune Co. will not be held responsible for the content posted to any forum page. All participants in the News Tribune Forum, accept all liabilities for comments posted.

That said, we do read all comments submitted. We have considered using software to "police" the content submitted or allowing readers to flag objectionable material. We do not feel that these two solutions compare to our editors and trained assistants making sure that the content is suitable for publication.

This begs the question as to what is suitable.

As a news organization, we choose to only report the news and allow the reader to form their own opinion. Since we do want you to give your opinion, we give a lot of leeway to readers who choose to criticize or find fault with our reports. In the same way, we allow the same freedoms to readers who choose to post on forums not associated with the News Tribune directly. Please know that we do draw the line in these ways:

1. User names do not ensure anonymity. To make your user account anonymous, you must register and be signed in. Click on your name in the upper right corner (in grey). This will take you to your profile page. In the grey bar that is sitting under the light blue navigation bar, you will see your first name's and profile- ex. "Joe's Profile". To the right a few links over you will see "Anonymity". Click on this and fill out and submit the form. This tells us more about how to contact you in case you have a lead on a story. This will alert us that you have requested this option. We will notify you via email that we have completed verifying you and your comments will then appear as only the user name.

2. No profanity. No obscenity. No asterisks or slang that takes the place of objectionable words.

3. No name calling, insults or libelous accusations. We don't like to see words like "idiot", "moron" or "fascist." We will be tolerant (to an extent) of criticisms of public officials, but we will delete comments attacking other forum members. Personal attacks on our reporters will not be tolerated. Ethnic, racial, religious or sexual slurs will be deleted.

4. Stay on point. Comments that stray from the topic will be bounced. And we tend to set the bar even higher when we have a huge flow on a certain subject and some of the sentiments seem repetitive. Try not to dominate the conversation so that other people have the opportunity to express their opinions even if they disagree with yours.

5. Do not post press releases. Send them to news @ newstribune.com

6. Don't rage and don't SHOUT. UPPERCASE comments are less effective in getting your points across. We prefer a more tempered conversation. We show respect, we expect you to do the same.

7. Please use your real name. You know who we are, so we would like to know who you are. If you sign your name Bill Clinton or Jimmy Hendrix, we'll in all likelihood delete it, unless we're certain you're the former president or the reincarnation of one heck of a musician. On occasion we may send a blast email to all registered participants. If your email bounces back, we will delete the account.

8. Include your e-mail address so we know how to contact you, but it won't be posted. If your comments don't meet the guidelines for posting, we may at least refer them to a reporter whenever we deem the information worthy of further investigation.

9. Your comments are limited to 125 words.

10. Advertisements are not tolerated. If you want to post a comment about a business, go the News Tribune's Business Directory.

11. We may alter these policies some time in the future.

12. The News Tribune reserves the right to block the ability to post comments or to block abusers of these policies if need be. We may choose to terminate the blog thread if the commenting has become redundant or too abusive of these policies.

13. Some observations by New York Times editor Jim Roberts were used in the formulation of these guidelines.