Hi, everyone!

First of all, thank you for reading the work from our student journalists! We’ve never had quite this much engagement on any of our articles, and we’re excited that so many people are reading our writing. 

Because we haven’t previously had this much engagement, we previously did not have a comment policy. Given the level of attention we’ve gotten recently, we’ve realized that this is necessary. Our comment policy, which you should now see when you go to leave a comment, is as follows: 

The Pioneer Press intends for this area to be used to foster healthy, thought-provoking discussion. Comments are expected to adhere to our standards and to be respectful and constructive. As such, we do not permit the use of profanity, foul language, personal attacks, or the use of language that might be interpreted as libelous. Comments are reviewed and must be approved by a moderator to ensure that they meet these standards. The Pioneer Press requires a valid email address and first and last name to post a comment. The email address will not be displayed but will be used to confirm your comments. Know that all comments are fully accessible to the public. If the healthy, thought-provoking discussion that we aim for is not being achieved on a particular story, we will stop approving comments/turn off comments for that story.

We have now used these criteria for all recent comments, even ones that had, perhaps, been initially approved. Please know that all submitted comments are saved, even if they are not approved. That being said, if you had previously posted a comment that did not fit these criteria and would like to repost within these guidelines, we’d welcome your engagement!  We see people talking about the articles that we’re writing as a good thing.  Please just note that it takes time for us to moderate the comments, as they are not constantly monitored. 

We want to take some time to address some of the comments that we’ve been getting about our publication being one-sided or biased.  We try very hard to be objective journalists for all news articles, to the extent this is possible as humans who write.  For opinion articles, like with all articles, students have a choice in what they write about, which means that the topics of opinion articles are limited to the opinions of the people on our staff.  These opinion pieces represent the opinions of these individuals, not Jonathan Alder High School or even necessarily the rest of the staff of The Pioneer Press. Students are selected for the journalism staff based on their interest in journalism and recommendations from teachers. 

At this time, we do not have an established process for accepting op-eds from outside our staff (although we’re excited about the possibility of doing that in the future!). If you’re a high school student who has read one of our articles and thought, “I want to be able to write things like that!” then we encourage you to consider applying for journalism during the next scheduling period. 

Thanks for reading and supporting student journalism!

Megan Marling, advisor

& the staff of The Pioneer Press