Opinions
Readers of our web posts are invited to leave their thoughts on the wide array of content we publish by sending email to us at advocatesforardenarcade@gmail.com. Please keep in mind that our posts are about our unincorporated community, whether it's the part the County has artificially designated as "Arden Arcade" or other nearby parts of the UnCity run by the County. Social media posts and replies can sometimes stray off-topic or descend into hostility, name-calling, political posturing, and the like. So comments submitted to us will be reviewed by our editorial team to ensure that the content of comments is free of discriminatory remarks and rhetoric, profanity, off-topic prose, and misinformation. Additionally, it has become customary for fake accounts to post comments on websites like ours. For these reasons, we will peruse through comments and delete inappropriate posts on a discretionary basis. If you believe your comment has been treated unfairly, reach out to us at advocatesforardenarcade@gmail.com.
If you want to submit a comment in the form of a Letter to the Editor (LTE) please include your first and last name and an email address. We will not share your email address with anyone. If you do not want your last name published, please say so. In that case we will only publish your first name. The opinions and positions espoused in LTEs are yours, not ours. We want you to have a way to tell us what's on your mind.
If you wish to submit an opinion guest essay (what a newspaper would call an op-ed....a bit of prose about our community that reads more like one of our posts than a comment to the editor) we would like to work with you about how to fit your piece into our online format. Please submit your draft text to advocatesforardenarcade@gmail.com along with a graphic relevant to your text. We will not publish your essay until you have approved the final formatted version. Beyond the formatting, aside from reviewing your submittal as described in the first paragraph, above, your material will not be vetted by our editorial staff - say whatever you wish to say. When we do publish it, the content will be attributed to you. That's because, like LTEs, opinions and positions espoused in guest essays are not necessarily positions we endorse. Instead we see our Guest Opinions section as a platform to facilitate a broadly-informed community discussion.
If we decide on occasion to post an editorial about something happening in our community, we will post it in this section of our web site and clearly label it as being our opinion. For those readers who might perceive a certain, shall we say, "slant" to our everyday writings across the site, please know we try to present material in a way that invites people to ponder the issues, discuss them with other community members, and derive their own conclusions. Our editorials are not intended to be open-ended like our regular posts, though. They are instead designed to tell readers specifically where we stand.