HERITAGE NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL POLICY

NEWS AND EDITORIAL MISSION AND VISION

We must provide people with the news and information they value and need to understand their world, govern themselves effectively and improve their lives.

CORE VALUES

We believe that an informed public is our society’s only guarantee of freedom. We are first and foremost a local news organization, serving as the community’s watchdog, conscience and Forum

We believe that the cornerstone of our enterprise is journalistic integrity. We insist on honesty, accuracy and fairness in all our reporting. We will report progress and achievement as well as problems and injustices, offering our readers context and perspective. We will entertain as well as enlighten.  We believe that we are in partnership with readers who determines our success. We will solicit, hear, respect and act on their ideas. We will maintain standards of excellence and strive to delight customers with innovative content.

We believe that our news and editorial staffs are the heart of our journalistic mission. We will therefore:

  • Provide an environment that stimulates and values their creativity and reward them fairly.
  • Foster an atmosphere of mutual respect that empowers all employees yet acknowledge management responsibility to lead.
  • Help people learn, as individuals and as team members, enhancing their productivity in the face of constant change.

    MISSION 

Readership is how we measure our important to readers and our impact on the communities we serve. Therefore, our mission is to create goals and strategies to increase readership. We will work with the rest of our company to established goals to new subscribe and retain present ones, and we will seek to build readership in innovative ways.

PROFFESIONAL STANDARDS

The credibility of our news reporting requires fairness and impartiality, it demand the avoidance of conflict of interest, or even the appearance of such conflict- that might raise suspicion that the Newspaper or it staffs pursue political or other agenda in news stories.

We operate in the public domain, on or off the job. Our private behavior as well as our professional behavior must not bring discredit to our paper or our craft. Staff members should be aware that even seemingly innocuous actions- wearing a political button, signing a petition, displaying a bumper stickers, appearing on a list of contributors to political, quasi-political groups-may create a damaging impression in the public’s mind.

Our job is to chronicle the news, not make its participation in events such as public demonstrations were a staff member could be involved unintentionally in making the new, always will be discourage and must be approve in advance by the Editor or the Managing Director

COMMUNITY SERVICE

We are residents of this community. Its civic health matters to us as citizens, it cultural offerings enrich our lives and the lives of our families. The need to maintain journalistic impartiality doesn’t mean we have to detach from community life. On the contrary, the more we participate in community activities the better understanding we will have of the needs, aspirations and lives of the people we portray.

OUTSIDE WORK

News employees of Heritage Newspaper are expected to avoid any type of outside work – paid or unpaid that may be open to any interpretation that it affects or influences the content of the Newspaper.

Any outside work, even apparently unrelated to journalism can cause conflict.

INTEGRITY OF OUR REPORTING

We do not up anything that appears in our news column. We do not invent details or embellish facts in our stories.

The use of fictitious quotation, phantom sources or composite people as if they were real people is forbidden.

We do not misrepresent ourselves when gathering and reporting the news. People have a right to know they are talking to a journalist from Heritage Newspaper.

We will do our best to make sure ordinary people understand what they tell us will be used in our stories. We recognize many of the people we talk to may never before have been interviewed by a reporter. We’ll treat them and all other people we come in contact with respectively and honorably