Joint Hometown News Form [Click here to get started!]

Welcome to Joint Hometown News! We pride ourselves in telling the American military story one service member at a time. The Joint Hometown News Service supports military service members world-wide by sharing their personal stories and achievements with friends and family back home. This service is free to all Active Duty, Guard, and Reserve military members from all branches of service, including Federal employees. Get started here to fill out your Joint Hometown News Release!

A Note About DoD PKI Certificates

PKI certificates are required to access critical AF/DoD information gateways, including Outlook Web Access (OWA) for email, the AF Portal, AF networks and systems, and DoD Web sites. To enable a personal or non-government computer to access these official resources please go here. There you will find information needed to activate your CAC and access DOD websites at home and at work.

Tips for using JHNS Forms 11/6/2015 10:51:22 AM

Please use these tips when filling out your forms:

Public Affairs Office

 - Use the pull-down menus to select the closest post/base and unit PAO to review  your release.  If you can't find it or don't know who your PAO is, then select 'Fort Meade' and 'Joint Hometown News Service.'

Event Information

 - Use the comments section to add additional, important details for your story, especially if you select 'Other' and 'None' for your categories.

Personal Information

  - If you're announcing a promotion, please select your NEW rank in the pull-down menu.

Duty Information

  - Do NOT use abbreviations.

  - If you're not based in the U.S., put the country in with the 'Unit.'

  - In 'Duty Title,' please put your basic job, as if you were explaining it to a civilian.

Education

  - Do NOT use abbreviations.

  - 'High School' is two words.

  - If you graduated from home school, put 'a home school program in' and include the city, state and ZIP.

  - If you graduated outside the U.S., put the country in with the 'City,' select NY as the state, and put 00000 in for the ZIP.  Also, this requires you to include at least one relative with a U.S. ZIP Code.

  - If you have not completed college, please leave it blank.

  - If you have more than one degree, please list only your highest degree.

Relatives

  - List couples (parents, grandparents, etc.) who have the same last name and live together on the same line.  i.e. 'Debra and John'

  - Addresses should reflect where they currently live.

  - Street numbers are optional.

  - Please stick to immediate family and/or blood relatives.

Attachments

  - Do not submit anything with PII in it.

  - For photos, please include a caption in the 'Image Description' box.  A good caption identifies everyone in the photo (full name, title), identifies the location, and explains what is happening in the photo.

File Upload Limit 5/13/2014 10:53:42 AM

We recently applied a patch to the JHNS web applications to address a requirement on our end to limit the size of our email releases. They are becoming too large. This is, in part, due to the fact that users are attaching images that are very high in resolution, which means their size is exceptionally large. So, from now on, there is a 5MB upload limit per form. What this means is that the total size of all attached files cannot exceed 5MB. Each form may still have up to four files attached, but those four files cannot add up to more than 5MB. For example, you can upload one 5MB image or four 1.25MB images. If a user exceeds this limit, an error message is displayed. The proper recourse is to either remove files that are aleady attached to make room for new ones, or resize images before uploading them.