Terms of Service

The deal, in one paragraph

These terms govern your use of AKRON SCORE. By reading the site you accept them. They are the sort of document nobody enjoys, and we have kept them as short and as honest as we can, because terms written to trap a reader are not terms we want to rely on. If a clause here reads as one-sided, write to support@akronscore.org and ask about it, and we will either explain it or fix it.

Where these terms mention the law, they mean the law of the place where AKRON SCORE is established, without dragging you into a foreign court for the crime of reading a news site. Nothing here is meant to take away rights your local consumer law gives you and cannot sign away.

What you may do with what we publish

You may read, link to, and share our work freely. Quoting a portion with credit and a link back is not only allowed, it is welcome, and it is how journalism is supposed to travel. Posting a headline and a short extract to social media, sending a story to a friend, or citing us in your own writing are all fine.

What you may not do is republish whole articles, scrape the site wholesale, or pass our reporting off as your own or as somebody else’s. Feeding our pages into an automated system to rebuild a competing product is not fair use of a link, it is copying, and we treat it as such. If you want to license or syndicate our work, ask us. The mechanism for reporting infringement of your own material runs the other way, and it is on our DMCA and copyright page.

What we owe you, and what we do not

We owe you honest effort. We report carefully, source what we publish, and correct what we get wrong. What we cannot promise is that every fact on a fast-moving story is final at the instant you read it, that the site never goes down, or that a third party we link to has kept its own page accurate. News is a first draft, and a first draft is revised.

For that reason the site is provided on an as-is basis, and to the extent the law allows we do not give warranties beyond what your local law requires us to give. This is not a licence to be careless, and we do not read it as one. It is an acknowledgement that a newsroom publishing continuously cannot guarantee the future, only its own good faith. What the content is and is not meant for is spelled out in our disclaimer.

Comments and anything else you submit

Where we let you comment or otherwise submit material, you stay responsible for what you post. Do not post anything unlawful, defamatory, hateful, infringing, or designed to harass another reader, and do not impersonate someone else or pretend a submission is from AKRON SCORE. Do not use the site to distribute malware or to scrape other readers’ information.

By submitting something you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to publish, edit for length and clarity, and archive it in connection with the site. You keep ownership of your own words. We may remove a comment, close a thread, or decline a submission without a hearing, because a comment section is a space we host, not a public square we are obliged to run. Persistent abuse can cost you access.

Advertising and links off the site

The site carries advertising, and it links out to other sites, both in our reporting and in advertisements. A link is not an endorsement, and an advertisement is not a recommendation from the newsroom. We do not control third-party pages and are not responsible for what they contain, what they sell, or what they do with data you give them once you leave us.

Sponsored content, where it appears, is labelled as such. The wall between what advertisers pay for and what the newsroom decides is described on our advertise page and our ownership and funding page. If you ever see an advertisement here that looks like it is pretending to be one of our articles, tell us, because that is exactly what our rules forbid.

Things we have to say about liability

To the fullest extent the law permits, AKRON SCORE is not liable for indirect or consequential losses arising from your use of the site, from a decision you took on the strength of something you read here, or from the site being unavailable. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to what the law requires. Because news changes fast and is not professional advice, decisions with money, health or legal stakes belong with a qualified adviser and the primary source, not with a headline, a point our disclaimer makes at greater length.

Nothing in this section limits liability for anything that the law does not allow to be limited, such as death or personal injury caused by negligence, or fraud.

Changes, ending, and how disputes are handled

We may update these terms as the site changes. When we do, the date below moves, and for a material change a note sits at the top of the page for a while. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the new version, so it is worth glancing at the date. We may also change, suspend or discontinue any part of the site, because a publication is a living thing and not a fixed contract.

If a dispute arises, the honest first step is almost always an email. Most disagreements about our journalism are really questions of accuracy, and those are handled faster and better through our corrections policy than through any legal channel. Write to support@akronscore.org and give us the chance to put it right. If a clause here is found unenforceable, the rest stands.

Last updated: August 2026