Old Gold & Black > Policies

Completed guest submissions in the form of columns or letters to the editor are due at 4 p.m. the Sunday prior to publication. Submissions are accepted only from university community members (students, faculty, staff, parents, or former members of each category).
Regular OGB columnists may reserve column space for the upcoming week, with an estimated word count, by leaving a message with the editorials editor at Ext. 5280, or sending an e-mail to These are the only two acceptable methods of reservation, and either must be done by 4 p.m. the Sunday before publication.
If you have reserved the space in the OGB, you are obliged to submit a column to fill it by the time specified by the editorials editor. Writers who reserve space and do not submit a column for publication may not be granted the right to reserve column space in the future.
The author’s names must be submitted. The author’s class year, major, hometown and any other relevant information about the author’s position on campus, or involvement in the issue discussed, should also be submitted for their description.
The OGB does not print anonymous submissions or those under pen names. Consult the OGB‘s Amonymous Sources Policy for more details.
The OGB does not print open letters as editorials. In order to print an open letter, one must purchase advertisement space from our business office.
We prefer to receive submissions as Rich Text Format or Microsoft Word documents. Attach them in an e-mail to ogboped@wfu.edu. Columns must be submitted via e-mail.
Generally, columns are 500 words long and letters to the editor are fewer than 500 words. Editorial submissions may not exceed 750 words. The Old Gold & Black reserves the right to shorten submissions so that they fit into one of the length specifications.
The OGB reserves the right to edit submissions for grammatical or spelling mistakes and to coincide with Associated Press or OGB style.
The Editorials editor will inform the author if a submission cannot be published due to profanity or factual errors, and will do so within 24 hours of submission deadline to allow the author to respond or correct the article themselves. For libel reasons the newspaper cannot run items it knows or suspects to be factually inaccurate.
The OGB can limit back-and-forth responses between writers to one each.
Due to the peculiarities of layout, the OGB cannot honor requests for story placement within a particular page, nor can we honor requests to have a certain portion included in the pull quote.
The OGB most often cannot publish headlines submitted along with a column or letter. Headlines and subheads are rewritten to meet two goals: (1) to fill the entire space available above the article, and (2) to draw readers into the story. Within these goals, we will do our best to have the headlines fit the opinions within the submissions.
For space reasons, the OGB may reject or postpone submissions. Submissions will be judged upon timeliness, importance to the university community, or time it was submitted.
The OGB will not run submissions intended to promote an event, but will forward the information, depending upon its nature, to the Calendar or Briefly listings. Deadlines for an announcement’s submission will be judged upon when they were forwarded, not submitted. Consult the Announcement Policy for more details.
The OGB reserves the right to revise editorial submissions for grammar and style. If an editorial submission is subject to substantial stylistic changes, the revised editorial will be sent back to the original author for approval before it is submitted for printing.
Open letters cannot be published in the OGB’s editorials section. Any person who wishes to publish an open letter in the paper is welcome to purchase advertising space at the standard, discounted rate for on-campus agencies, organizations, students, faculty and staff.
Once published, editorials that appear in the OGB will not be retracted.


The Student Newspaper of Wake Forest University	Established 1916