Editorial Policy

How Heart & Home Daily decides what to publish, who writes it, and what happens when we are wrong.

What we publish

Reporting and reflection on family life as it is lived by the person running the house: meals, grown children, grandchildren, caregiving, widowhood, and faith as it is practiced at home. We publish for an adult reader and assume she is capable of disagreeing with us.

What we do not publish

Personal advice about your family, your marriage, your health or your money. Anything that diagnoses. Anything that tells you what God intends by a particular loss. Lists of ten things. Anything written to be shared rather than read.

Sourcing

When an article rests on research, it names what kind of study it was, how big, and what it cannot tell you. A single study is reported as a single study. A survey with four hundred respondents is described as one. When our only source is a woman at a kitchen table in Dayton, we say so, and we do not dress her up as a trend.

Scripture

We quote it sparingly and we do not use it to end an argument. A verse offered as comfort is quoted as comfort; a verse used to close a subject is, in our experience, usually being used to close it on someone else.

Who writes here

Four people, named on every article, with editorial titles and nothing grander. Nobody here is credentialed to treat anyone, and we would rather you knew that than wondered.

Corrections

When we get a number, a name, a date or an attribution wrong, we correct the text and we note the correction at the foot of the article, dated, saying what was wrong. We do not edit silently. The correction log is kept by the editor and is the part of the job she takes most seriously.

Disagreement in the house

Our writers sometimes disagree with one another in print, by name. We think a publication that always agrees with itself is not thinking very hard.

What we sell

One guide, described on the page called Our guides. No article exists to sell it, no article quotes it, and we would publish the same articles if it did not exist.