Participation Guidelines and Terms

“How well we integrate immigrants and provide opportunities for all community members has far-reaching implications for—and is inextricable from—our nation’s vitality and prosperity.”
—A Toolkit for Grantmakers
Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees

Our Purpose
This site is designed to showcase media for, about, and by new immigrants to the U.S. We, at New Routes, want to support a community of people who are making that kind of media and wish to collaborate. New Routes intends to give the public a forum for discussing and critiquing media about immigrants.

New Routes Copyright
This site contains intellectual property owned by the Benton Foundation. You may quote short text passages if you attribute them to the New Routes site and Benton Foundation. If you wish to re-publish any significant amount of material from our site, more than a few quoted lines, please contact us for permission and be as specific as possible about where you found the material and how you propose to use it.

Submission Guidelines
We welcome your news items, funding information, research reports, media, or event listings related to improving the well-being of immigrants in the U.S. We also hope you will comment on and rate media using the quick-and-easy star system. When you consider commenting or submitting media, please act out of respect. If you notice disrespectful behavior, report it.

When commenting or contributing an item for submission, ask yourself if what you have to submit will increase the strength and richness of the New Routes community. Please use accurate headlines and tag for accuracy rather than readership.

Although we appreciate that many different languages are spoken by new immigrants to the U.S. we require all written submissions to be in English.

User Submissions Terms
Using our site means you agree to our guidelines and terms. If you disagree, please do not use the New Routes site.

User submissions include all uploads of media and all posts to the New Routes site. You are responsible for all of your submissions and the consequences of publishing them. You may post only under your own username, and are responsible for all posts from your account. You are also responsible for getting appropriate consent forms for photos, video, audio, and so on that you are uploading.

Your submissions may not infringe upon other’s enjoyment of the site. Do not post or link to material that is libelous, defamatory, false, obscene, violent, abusive, threatening, harassing, prejudicial, or hateful. You may only submit content for which you have the copyright or specific permission from the copyright holder to submit the content.

You may not violate, plagiarize, or infringe on the rights of others.

You acknowledge that by submitting content you give New Routes permission to distribute it. You retain the copyright to media you submit. We suggest you assign a Creative Commons license to any media you submit to us. However, suggestions, ideas, notes, drawings, concepts, or other information disclosed or offered to New Routes through this site or in response to New Routes solicitations shall become the property of New Routes and the Benton Foundation. We may use these responses for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without compensating you.

You may not use our Web site for commercial purposes. Don’t post or submit requests for money and don’t promote anyone’s commercial services or products.

New Routes, the Benton Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and MasComm Associates, LLC, or any of their agents, do not endorse and are not responsible for any statement, opinion, or advice given or made by anyone other than their authorized representatives. All postings and media found on the site are those of the author, and you rely on such information at your own risk.

We may remove any submission or content or decide not to publish a submission at our discretion.

Links to New Routes Web Site
We welcome links to individual pages within the New Routes site, but please do so in a way that presents the page in its entirety. Don’t cause one of our Web pages to appear within the frame of another site and don’t link to individual page elements such as a graphic or photograph.

You may not link directly to any video, audio file or to a PDF found on our site; you must link to the New Routes page from which the file is accessed. Please link to our Web pages in text format only. We may occasionally change site structure and page filenames, which would might result in broken links from external sites.

Commenting and Rating New Routes Media
A key element of the New Routes site is peer review. Any registered user can watch, listen to, or read and comment on any media file. Our idea is to help one another make good media and so enrich our communities—both geographic and online communities.

1. To comment upon a piece of media, use the “add new comment” link at the end of every media Web page.

2. Please listen, read, or watch the whole piece of media before commenting or rating the work.

3. New Routes wants thoughtful affirmative comments that answer the questions, “Did you enjoy this piece? Would you like to see, read, hear more of it?” We will delete pans and suspected self-promotional posts.

4. To indicate how much you enjoyed the piece, use the star rating system, with 1 star meaning "very little" and 5 stars meaning "a lot".

5. If you hate a piece and do not wish to see, hear, or watch more of it, simply do not review it.

6. In your comments, please tell us why you liked a piece and explain your reasoning, too.

7. You may wish to use this list to think about how to write your reviews. This list was inspired by the core values espoused by the Public Radio Program Directors’ Association and originally found on the PRX Web site:
a. Honesty
b. Substance
c. Accuracy
d. Respectfulness
e. Credibility
f. Creativity
g. Civility
h. Promotes understanding
i. Quality of craft
j. Depth
k. Humor