Community Guidelines

The Porch Press is your neighborhood’s paper — written by the people who live here. It’s for the small, true stuff: the bakery that opened on Main, the council vote that didn’t go your way, the dog someone found by the creek. You don’t need a press badge or a perfect sentence. You just need something real worth telling your neighbors.

The Press is a little different from the rest of Porch. Most of Porch is just you and a handful of neighbors — knocks that open private chats, posts that fade in 30 days. But an article in the Press, once a real person reads it and approves it, goes out to your whole town — to people you’ve never met, naming places and neighbors who didn’t ask to be in the paper. So we read every submission first. Not to police you, and not because we expect the worst — because the paper, like the porch, is someone’s home, and a good host looks out for everyone on it.

Most of what follows isn’t a hard rule so much as the spirit of the place. The instinct is always the same: protect named neighbors and vulnerable people first, leave plenty of room for honest local reporting, and when something good-faith straddles a line, fix it or ask rather than turn it away. Write like you’re talking to someone three doors down — because you are.

What the Press is for

Real, local, worth-telling stories — if you’d say it leaning over a fence, it belongs.

• ✓Publish the small, true stuff with a clear local angle: a new shop, a school win, a vote that matters, a notice, a happening, a lost dog, a remembered storm.
• ✓Use the kind of piece that fits — Story, Notice, Happening, or Lost & Found — so news doesn’t get lost.
• ✓If a piece could be posted to any town anywhere, it probably doesn’t belong here. The Press isn’t a national-news repost, a generic listicle, or AI filler written to fill space.
• ✓The Press is not a marketplace. There are no classifieds, coupons, fundraisers, or “DM me to buy” listings — that’s by design. A neighbor mentioning their own shop in passing, or posting a genuine event, is welcome; a piece that exists mainly to sell or drive traffic is an ad, and isn’t.

Keep it kind: criticism yes, cruelty no

Go after ideas, decisions, and institutions all you want — just not your neighbors as people.

• ✓Tough, fact-based criticism of a public official, candidate, business, or public decision is exactly what a healthy local paper does. Welcome it.
• ✓Don’t run a piece that exists mainly to single out, humiliate, or settle a score with a named neighbor — name-calling, mocking someone’s looks or family or livelihood, or rallying the town against one person.
• ✓The test: are you informing the town, or trying to make one person’s life miserable? Even true statements can cross the line when the clear purpose is to degrade or incite a pile-on.
• ✓A neighbor describing a bad first-hand experience with a shop or contractor — stated as their experience — is fine. An “article” that’s really a vendetta is not.

True and fair, not rumor dressed as news

Serious accusations about a named person or business must be backed up — or clearly framed as opinion.

• ✓If you accuse a named person or business of something serious (fraud, abuse, a crime, cheating customers), it needs to be true and something you can stand behind, or clearly stated as your honest opinion.
• ✓Don’t state damaging things as settled fact when you don’t actually know they’re true. Don’t present an unproven allegation as a finding of the Press.
• ✓Honest first-person opinion and reviews are protected — “in my experience the food was cold” is fine. Fabricated events to destroy a business (“I saw the chef spit in the food”) are not.
• ✓You can report that a business was charged, cited, or sued — attributed to the public record — and you can cover an allegation as an ongoing, accurately-attributed claim.

Protect people’s privacy and safety

Name people in the news without handing strangers a map to their front door.

• ✓Don’t publish a private person’s home address, personal phone, workplace, daily routine, license plate, or their kids’ school to the whole town.
• ✓A business’s public storefront address and listed phone, or a public official’s official office contact, are fair game.
• ✓Lost & Found describes where the item was found (“keys near 5th & Oak”), not where a person lives.
• ✓Watch photos for things that quietly expose people: house numbers, plates, the faces of non-consenting bystanders. Redact when in doubt.

Hard news, handled with care

Cover crime, accidents, disasters, and loss — without the gore, the panic, or the pile-on.

• ✓Report what happened and what it means. Skip graphic photos of dead or injured people and lingering, blow-by-blow descriptions of wounds — spare neighbors and the families involved.
• ✓Put genuinely graphic-but-newsworthy detail behind a clear content warning, or trim it. Shock content posted for its own sake doesn’t run.
• ✓On sensitive events, don’t name victims, don’t print addresses that endanger someone, and don’t repeat unconfirmed accusations.
• ✓Self-harm and suicide have a place — survivor stories, remembrances, mental-health pieces — but never with method detail, encouragement, or glorification. If you’re struggling, call or text 988 (US).

The lines that never move

A short, hard floor — these never run, no matter how a piece is dressed up.

• ✕No slurs or dehumanizing content attacking people for who they are — race, ethnicity, nationality or immigration status, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or age. (Reporting on a hate incident, without using slurs to do it, is journalism and is welcome.)
• ✕No threats of harm to a person or place, and nothing egging others on to it — including “someone should…” framing or calls to show up somewhere ready for a fight.
• ✕Nothing that sexualizes a minor — image, drawing, AI-generated, or text — ever. No nuance, no second look.
• ✕No explicit sexual content or nudity: this is an all-ages paper anyone in town might open. (Sex-ed notices, a clinic opening, a Pride event, an honest non-explicit piece on dating or health are all fine.)
• ✕No using the Press to sell illegal goods, arrange an illegal transaction, or teach someone how to commit a crime. Reporting on crime and debating drug or gun policy are completely fine — just don’t transact or instruct here.
• ✕No impersonation, scams, phishing, or spam — these are already the house rules in the Terms, and they apply here too.

How review works

Every piece is read before it runs. There are three outcomes: approve when it’s good and clean; request changes when it’s mostly good with a fixable snag; and reject only when it doesn’t belong on the Press at all. We never turn something away silently — every request and rejection comes with a short, kind, specific note, and you’re always welcome to edit and resend.

While a piece waits, only you can see it, and it usually takes about a day. Once it’s live and a neighbor flags something, we’ll take another look — there are no public report counts, ever. And we give people the benefit of the doubt: when we’re on the fence, we lean toward yes.