Letters policy

A letter is a resident's own argument, in their own words. We did not verify it the way we verify a story, and it does not carry our authority. Every letter says so — on the page it runs on, on the card that goes to Facebook, and in the AI policy.

Letters live at /letters and nowhere else. A letter never enters the news feed, the daily issue, the newsletter, the RSS feeds, or site search. That separation is the point: if opinion could reach the same surfaces as reporting, the label would be decoration.

Anyone with something to say about Big Bear Valley. There is no residency test and no subscription. A letter sent through the form runs between 200 and 6,000 characters — long enough to make an argument, short enough that someone will read it to the end.

Write about the valley. A letter that is really about national politics, or is really an advertisement, is not what this page is for.

Letters run under a real name and the part of the valley you write from — Big Bear Lake, Sugarloaf, Fawnskin, Moonridge, Erwin Lake. Signing is most of what makes a letter worth reading.

You can ask us to withhold your name. We would publish the letter as “Name withheld by request” with your town, and the address bar would not carry your name either. Two things to be clear about: it is a request, not a guarantee — we may come back to you before deciding, and we may decline to run it anonymously — and we still know who you are. Your name is in our records. It is simply not on the page.

An email address is required, and it is never published. After you send a letter we mail you a link, and clicking it is how we know the address is really yours. Without that click a letter cannot be published — not as a matter of habit, but because the database refuses to mark it published. The link is good for 30 days.

This is the whole anti-impersonation control. We publish under people's names in a small valley, and nothing else stops someone writing in as their neighbour.

Nothing here auto-publishes, ever. Confirming your address does not publish anything; it puts your letter in a queue a person works through. If it runs, someone wrote the headline by hand — that is deliberately the step that cannot be automated.

We cannot promise publication and we cannot promise a reply. We may come back to you before deciding.

Letters are edited for length and clarity, and we write the headline. We do not edit your argument into a different one.

What we do not do is check a letter the way we check a reported story. So there is a floor: a letter resting on a factual claim Big Bear News cannot stand behind gets edited down or turned down. We are not willing to launder an unverifiable claim through the masthead, and “it was only a letter” is not a defense we want to need.

We will say no to a letter that rests on a factual claim we can't stand behind, that is an advertisement, that attacks a private person, or that would identify a writer who asked to be anonymous. We can also simply decide not to run one. This is a small operation and letters are read one at a time; a rejection is an editorial judgment, not a verdict on you.

If we turn your letter down, we'll point you at this page. That is what it is for.

When a letter publishes we post it to the Big Bear News Facebook page automatically, as a card linking back to the letter. Submitting a letter accepts that; there is no opt-out, which is why it is disclosed on the form and again in the email you get.

A withheld name stays withheld there. The card, the caption and the image alt text are built from the published name only, so a name we agreed not to print cannot reach Facebook by accident.

Email hello@bigbear.news from the address you sent the letter from, and say which of these you want:

• Take it off the site. The letter comes down and its URL stops resolving.
• Delete it. The letter and everything attached to it are removed from our database. There is no undo and no tombstone page.
• Take my details off, the letter can stay. We drop your email address and keep the published letter.

The first two also delete the Facebook post. We can only promise the attempt: a post that has already been read, shared or screenshotted is not something we can recall, and neither is a search engine's cache. That is the real reason the disclosure sits on the form rather than only here.

Three windows, and they run on their own — nobody has to remember to do this.

• A letter we turned down is deleted 30 days after the rejection. Shorter than anything else we keep. A rejected letter is a resident's real name, town, email address and an opinion we decided not to run; there is no editorial reason to hold it. The month exists only so a rejection made in error can be undone.
• A letter whose address was never confirmed is deleted after 60 days. Double the 30-day life of the confirmation link, so a late click never lands on a row we already deleted.
• A published letter's email address is dropped 90 days after publication. The address had one job and it finished it at confirmation. Ninety days leaves room to reach you about a correction. Then the address goes and the letter stays.

How we handle personal information generally is in the privacy policy.

Because there is no editor. As /about puts it: nobody here attends a council meeting, works a source, or files a public records request. Calling this “letters to the editor” would borrow a title from a role nobody on this site occupies.

What is true is smaller, and enough: a person reads your letter, edits it, writes a headline, and decides. The rules on this page are what that person is bound by.

Big Bear News is owned and operated by one person, Andrew Sauer, and in 2026 he is a candidate for the Big Bear City Community Services District board. Letters he writes run on this page under the same rules as everyone else's, with three differences you should know about. Each one opens and closes with a note naming his roles and his ownership of this site. Nobody independent edits or checks them. And they can run longer than the form allows, because he loads them himself.

So the same space is open to every candidate for the same office, on the same terms and at the same length. The form is the door. If its length limit is in the way, email hello@bigbear.news and the letter runs at full length. A letter about an issue may be pinned to the top of the page. A letter about his own candidacy never is.

If we introduced an error while editing, or published something that should not have run, tell us at hello@bigbear.news. Corrections are published in the open at /corrections.

Ready to write one? The form is on the letters page.