Mission Statement
The CVPost provides unreported and underreported news, analysis and commentary on topics of local interest in the Chippewa Valley.
Transparency Statement
The Chippewa Valley Post is committed to the principle of transparency in its operations. We will strive to explain as fully as possible how we cover news of the Chippewa Valley community, and why we make the inevitable news judgment decisions that are needed.
We encourage feedback, criticism, suggestions and questions from our audience and we will do our best to respond to any and all of these. We will expect our community journalists to be equally responsive to their audience.
We know it is impossible for anyone to shed entirely her or his background and experiences and that these inevitably influence news judgments. We will do our best to minimize these influences, and we ask our audience members to be equally aware that their perceptions of the material we present also are influenced by their backgrounds and experiences. We hope that none of this will get in the way of our efforts to engage you – our audience – more fully in the community life of the Chippewa Valley.
Non-Discrimination Policy
The CVPost does not discriminate on the basis of race, ancestry, color, age, familial status, disability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, lawful sources of income, national origin or any other discriminatory practice prohibited by state or federal law. (Approved by the CVPost Board of Directors on Feb. 5, 2018)
Policy in regard to material submitted by candidates for political office
- Candidates for public office are welcome to submit articles on topics of current relevance and interest to the public. We will not publish material that relates to a specific campaign from a candidate in that campaign or from anyone allied with that campaign.
- Such material will be evaluated – as are all submissions – on the topic’s timeliness and its interest and value to our audience as well as on the quality of the writing.
- We will publish no more than two such articles by a candidate during any single campaign for a public office. We define campaigns in a contested primary election and in a general election as separate entities. For our purposes, a campaign begins when a person announces her or his candidacy for office.
- Final decisions to publish or not publish such submitted material rest with the CVPost.
- This policy may be revised or amended to meet unforeseen or changing circumstances.
(Approved by the Board of Directors on May 27, 2020.)
“Commentary” Policy
The “Commentary” page of the Chippewa Valley Post is intended to be a forum for civil discussion of issues and events, relevant to our audience, on which reasonable people can and will differ. Through this page, we hope to expose members of our audience to ideas, opinions and thoughtful analysis that they wouldn’t necessarily seek out on their own. We expect that this may create some initial discomfort, but we hope that it will also encourage people (that means you, among others) to think about, rather than merely react to, these “different” perspectives and perhaps to join in the dialogue.
As legal scholar Cass Sunstein has put it, we’re trying to keep you from making a choice that’s all too easy on the Internet – namely, choosing to filter material so you encounter only ideas and topics that you’re familiar and comfortable with. We hope to prevent our audience members from constructing, in Sunstein’s words, a “Daily Me” account of the world around them by ignoring everything that doesn’t fit with preconceived ideas.
We invite your participation in this effort through contributions to the “Commentary” page. There are only a few rules governing these contributions and none of them have anything to do with the point of view being expressed. The rules are: 1) the subject matter must be directly relevant to residents of the Chippewa Valley – commentary on events and issues that don’t relate in some way to our audience will not be accepted; 2) the discussion must be civil – that doesn’t mean it can’t espouse a strong position, but it does rule out derogatory personal remarks and other comments that are gratuitously disrespectful to the dignity of others; 3) all contributions must identify the author – no anonymous material will be accepted, in part because transparency demands such accountability and in part because of our belief that anonymity too often has led online writers to think that restraints requiring civility are no longer relevant; and 4) commentary needs to be based on fact rather than being unsupported opinion (even civil unsupported opinion).
We do, of course, reserve the right to edit (or ask for revisions) on the basis of excessive length or redundancy, legal concerns and taste. Note, too, that if you’re repeating much of what others have already written on this page, we’ll probably decline to run your material.
On occasion, we will also post relevant commentary obtained from various outside sources and that will be subject to these same four rules. Please help us enrich thoughtful and civil dialogue in the Chippewa Valley by reading the “Commentary” page and responding to it.
– The Board and Editor of the Chippewa Valley Post