DECIDING THE CHARACTER AND TONE

We would like to remind everyone that there is great power in the written and spoken word. It is up to you as new members of this community journalism effort to ensure that the site discussions are constructive and informative. Discussions will feature a variety of viewpoints. Not every discussion on the site will fall in line with the values/morals/lifestyles of every community member. We suggest you disregard the conversations that are not appropriate for you, and instead focus on the topics to which you can relate.

Before you create a discussion, we encourage you to think about the purpose of your post and what you hope to learn or gain from the responses. When you seek input/opinions from other community members, be prepared to get all types of feedback. Debates can be enlightening, but should remain focused on the topic and not become personal. If a comment isn't something you would say face-to-face to someone you just met, then it probably shouldn't be typed in our forums or blogs. Vulgar, obscene and/or gratuitous comments will be removed immediately and the posters reprimanded or removed. FCC-accepted cusswords, while not encouraged or condoned, are tolerated. We hope our community members will speak to one another with kindness, respect and appropriate language. You, as the members of todaythv.com, determine the character and tone for the site. We encourage you to invest positive energy to make it the informative and entertaining site it is intended to be.

In many ways, we’d like our community journalism participants to adopt the same journalistic standards that Today’s THV uses. What are those standards? Click the THV Info tab to find several pages listed that explain many of our journalistic values, standards and practices we use every day. Our newsroom has a guiding vision and mission that we hope you will keep in mind as you participate in this new medium of community journalism. Our vision is something we aspire to…something that doesn’t happen with every story we do, but we try. That vision was expressed by Edward R. Murrow, a pioneer in the early days of CBS broadcast journalism. Mr. Murrow said, “Television should teach, illuminate and inspire.” Not every story hits that lofty target, but we certainly will try to do this and we hope you will too. Our mission is more simple and easy to accomplish. That mission is to “serve the people, inform the public and preserve the democracy.” Every task we do serves this mission, whether it is something technical or journalistic, no matter how small or how large the task. By participating in the journalistic process of gathering truth and providing that truthful information to one another we are serving one another, we are informing one another, we are preserving our participatory democracy.