Fayette Newspapers’ municipal election coverage

2009-10-19

By Trey Alverson

Over the past few months we’ve undergone quite a few changes here at Fayette Newspapers. Matt Guthrie took over as publisher in July and I accepted a promotion to news and sports editor shortly thereafter.

We promoted former Fayette Neighbor editor Martha Barksdale to a full time position and also brought in a new full time staff reporter, Mary Moore. We launched a new weekly free paper, The Fayette Chronicle, which both expands our circulation and offers locals a sample of the high caliber product they can receive three times each week by subscribing to Fayette County News or Today in Peachtree City.

We’ve worked hard to replace syndicated stories, columnists and features with more local content.

However, not everything about Fayette Newspapers needs an update. We’re not going to change how we cover local elections.

It has long been our company policy to refrain from endorsing candidates for local office. While we encourage everyone to follow local politics and get out to the polls Nov. 3, we’re not going to tell anyone explicitly or implicitly how he or she should vote.

It takes a great deal of time, courage and effort to run for local office. We respect our neighbors who put themselves in the spotlight to ask for our votes. And we respect our readers. As a community newspaper, we’re here to ensure that our readers know the candidates and understand the issues, but we’re also committed to fairness and integrity.

Shortly after the qualifying for the 2009 municipal elections wrapped up last month, we sent letters and questionnaires to all 21 candidates for local office. We’ll publish each participating candidate’s answers in a special Fayette voter’s guide that will hit the streets at the end of this month. We’ve asked each candidate to limit responses to 100 words per question to ensure that we won’t have to edit their words for space constraints.

We also encouraged each office-seeker to submit one letter to the editor advocating his or her candidacy, which will be printed in our papers and on our Web site prior to the election.

While readers of our Web site can leave comments on all stories -- including candidates’ letters to the editor -- they cannot do so anonymously. As always, every comment that is left at www.fayette-news.com will be reviewed and verified before publication.

The response from the local candidates has been overwhelmingly positive thus far. They appreciate the opportunity to get their unique messages out to the voters.

While we hope all of the candidates choose to participate in our voter’s guide, we’re certainly not going to threaten those that decide not to answer our questions with bad publicity.

Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the big city paper from up the road has decided to change course and refrain from endorsing candidates for the upcoming Atlanta municipal elections.

In an October 9 column, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Editorial Board wrote, “We have heard from readers — and we agree — that you don’t need us to tell you how to vote. What readers tell us they need is information on who the candidates are, what they have done and what they want to do in the new job.”

That’s exactly how we feel at Fayette Newspapers. We’ve been doing things that way for years.


Alverson is the news and sports editor for this paper and proud graduate of Fayette County High School.

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