The Carnation’s 2024 Town Election Coverage Ground Rules

Here’s how we’ll report on the upcoming races

With the 2024 Town Election on the horizon, the Carnation wants to clearly communicate its policies in regards to letters to the editor, candidates’ submissions and overall political coverage.

Each candidate is welcome to submit an introductory letter with bio, platform, website and/or social links, campaign kickoff event date and contact information. Beyond that, no candidate will be allowed to write guest columns or letters to the editor. This includes incumbents.

We will run profiles on all candidates who wish to answer our Q&A, which will be sent after Feb. 19. Profiles will be published once all candidates in a race have submitted their answers or when the deadline to submit passes. Once one profile runs, no additional responses may be submitted, so please watch for our email.

The Carnation and Town Crier are sponsoring a Candidates Forum. Uncontested office seekers will be invited to present their platforms on Wed., March 27, while the Select Board candidates forum will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 28, moderated by Robert Hayes. Both evenings will be televised by Tewksbury Telemedia. All candidates are invited to take part.

Letters to the editor from resident supporters or elected officials endorsing a candidate must be received at least one week prior to the election. We will publish the final group of letters on the Thursday before the election, April 4.

Unions or any other group that wish to have endorsements run in the Carnation must extend the courtesy of an interview to all candidates running for a given office.

All letters will run on a first received, first published basis and may be run in groups for a single candidate. Submissions that appear to be form letters instead of the author’s own words will not be printed. We reserve the right to reject any letter based on editorial judgement and will provide our reasoning.

Campaign stops, visibilities, community forums and public events involving incumbents or candidates will be evaluated for coverage based on their public impact, news relevance and availability of our team.

We will run notifications of public events, such as kickoffs, in our weekly lineups and Community Events section if submitted in a timely manner. We need at least three days prior for a Community Event listing and by Thursday the week before for the Monday column.

We do not accept political, or any other, paid advertising. Our intent is to provide comprehensive coverage of all local races, contested and uncontested, in a way that respects Tewksbury’s tradition of civil discourse and is fair to all candidates and helpful to our readers when deciding how to cast their votes on April 6.

The above is the position of the Tewksbury Carnation staff. We welcome letters and discussions on this and other events of interest to the community.