About
About the Journal
The Good Neighbor Journal is a small American paper written for readers who are sixty and over — and, just as often, for the son or daughter or neighbor who ends up reading it aloud at the kitchen table. We publish three or four pieces a month in plain words, and we try very hard not to waste anyone's afternoon.
The Journal is independent. No company owns it, and it is put together by a handful of people rather than a newsroom. That is a limitation and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. It also means nobody here has an interest in frightening you, which is the whole reason the paper exists.
What we publish, and what we do not
Everything here is general information, written for a general reader. It is never medical advice, and it is never written about you in particular, because we do not know you. We have no way of knowing your history, your prescriptions, or what your own physician has already told you — and those are the three things that decide what any piece of health information actually means for a person.
So the standing rule in this office is simple. If a sentence would only be safe coming from someone who had examined you, we do not print it. What we print instead is the background: what a word means, what ordinarily changes with age, and which questions are worth writing down before an appointment. The appointment is where the answers live.
How a piece gets chosen
Most subjects arrive from readers' letters. When the same question turns up four or five times in a season — why a flight of stairs got harder, what the humidity in a bedroom has to do with anything, whether a thing is worth a phone call — that is usually a piece.
From there it is unglamorous work. We write it plainly, cut the parts that only sound clever, and read it back to someone in the age bracket it was written for. If they have to read a paragraph twice, the paragraph is wrong, not the reader. Anything that could only be supported by waving at a study comes out entirely.
The editor
Margaret Hayes has edited the Journal since it began. She spent most of her working life in publishing, largely on reference and local reporting, and came to this subject the ordinary way: by helping her own mother, who is eighty-four, work out which of her clippings and pamphlets applied to her and which did not. She lives in the United States, keeps a garden she describes as optimistic, and answers the mail herself.
Margaret Hayes is not a doctor. She has no clinical training and does not claim any. She is an editor, which means her job is to make information readable and to keep the paper honest about the difference between explaining something and advising someone.
Plainly stated
The Good Neighbor Journal does not diagnose, and it has no clinical staff. Nothing published here is a substitute for care from a licensed physician who knows your history. If something about your health has changed, or if something you read here concerns you, speak to your own doctor. In an emergency in the United States, call 911.
Publisher
The Good Neighbor Journal
[REPLACE: street address, city, state, ZIP]
hello@goodneighborjournal.com
Letters about the paper, corrections, and suggestions for subjects are all welcome at that address. Corrections are the ones we read first. More on writing to us is on the contact page.