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These are the guidelines for news sent to A-Infos for distribution. They will be flexibly applied by the A-Infos Collective members who do the screening of posts.We encourage the submission of news, reports and articles, including texts from printed or web-based publications of anarchist organizations (and of anti-authoritarian equivalents), but please keep all posts consistent with the purpose of A-Infos, which is to distribute news "about and of interest to anarchists" **. This does not mean only anarchists can submit news, but we do expect it to be consistent with these guidelines.
1) We welcome views which do not contradict a basic anarchist position. We do not carry material which promotes discrimination and suppression of people (ie. racists - Nazis, Zionists, etc. - or sexists - male chauvinists, patriarchal or homophobic material). We do not carry material which advocates electoral politics not posts which advocate voting for state agencies or apparatus or building parties.
We do not distribute posts which support authoritarian "revolutionary" politics or any text that serves the propaganda of vanguardists, leninists or any proponents of state capitalism. Neither do we distribute posts which express support for people jailed because they promoted authoritarian "revolutionary" politics, vanguardism, leninism or any other form of state capitalism. We may choose to distribute posts with such content when we believe that the circulation of such material will damage the cause of those who produced it.
We do not distribute posts that advocate any sort of national supremacy or any other supremacy or contempt and disrespect of one section of the exploited masses.
Posts about anarchist or other anti-authoritarian organizations' cooperation with other kinds of organizations or initiatives involved in the struggle against oppression, or other one-issue causes, may be distributed only if these (or at least the joint projects) are non-authoritarian, make no claims of national or any other superiority, or chauvinism of any kind and if the content of the posts is of a social, class-struggle nature.
If a post from an anarchist or an anarchist organization includes an attack/criticism on another anarchist or anarchist collective, it may be distributed only if it does not include name-calling, if it includes all the relevant facts and if the facts have been verified by the editor.
In any case where there is no clear precedent, where there is doubt or where a post to be rejected/deleted was sent in the name of an anarchist collective, the editor will send a copy of the post to the a-infos-org list of the Collective.
2) We try to provide a balanced anarchist news distribution service. Thus, we are unlikely to accept more than 14 posts from any one source or 20 posts about any one topic in a given week. Exceptions to this will be made for news of particular importance Another exception is made for articles from printed anarchist publications. All the articles from any current issue of an anarchist publication can be sent together. The editors will then send them to the lists at a rate of two or three a day.
3) We prefer news written by anarchists or by other people directly involved in the struggle against all the various, interrelated forms of dominance, exploitation and suppression (such as the system of class society, capitalism, suppression and discrimination according to gender, race, nationality, citizenship, sexual affiliation, age etc.).
Most of all, we prefer news that refers to the interrelation of the various struggles rather than articles which only criticize certain oppressions while ignoring or even supporting others.
Posts composed by individuals which are not mainly reports on direct actions of anarchists or other direct struggles we are interested in, and which do not contradict other guidelines, will be distributed in the supplement list, a-infos-sup.
Exceptions to this are texts that have already been distributed in printed format by anarchist collectives or equivalents or when the author is in the news, (like prisoners, etc.).
Another exception will be if the A-Infos Collective considers the specific text to be of high importance.
This will be made for posts which are supposed to be distributed in a-infos-sup (or already distributed there), but which a member of the A-Infos Collective considers worthy for distribution on the main lists.
In this case, the post will be sent to the a-infos-org list. If two other members approve the proposal and no other member objects within 48 workdays hours, then it will be distributed with the subject beginning with (SUP).
If any member objects within these 48 hours, a quick MOTION vote will be taken over the following 48 hours, to be decided by simple majority of voters.
4) [EXCERPT]ing
We treat posts submitted to A-Infos that include content which is appropriate for distribution together with content which is not appropriate as follows:
If a post includes various items that each can stand alone, each item is treated separately.
If an item is not appropriate for any reason (because it contradicts guidelines or is similar to a text already distributed, etc.), it will be cut out and we will add [EXCERPT] to the subject and -snip- in the place where the item was cut.
If an item includes credit or links to authoritarians of the "left", the offending sentence(s) will be cut.
If the text as it is cannot be adjusted to meet our guidelines in the above way, the editor will contact the sender with a request to edit the post and adjust it to our guidelines.
In marginal cases, an editor's note about reservations regarding the text may be all that is needed.5) We ask contributors to format their mail for A-Infos as follows:
a) Give your mail a clear subject line starting with the correct language code, such as (en) for English, (ca) for Castillian, (it) for Italian. See FAQ for a complete list of language tags.
b) Start your post with a paragraph summarizing what it is about. This may be the first paragraph of the article but please move any contact information, such as e-mail/postal addresses, URLs etc., to some point after the first paragraph.
c) Check that the item you're sending has not already been sent by someone else.
d) In order for people to be better informed about what they are reading, we would request that people sending messages to A-Infos include some or all of the following information, where appropriate:
i. Where the information comes from, an e-mail address and/or URL.
ii. If the message mentions collectives or organizations or is a collective statement from a particular organisation, then add some brief information about the aims and objectives of that organisation.
iii. If you are sending information from a source which many anarchists would consider authoritarian, please say why it could still be considered of interest to anarchists.
Please note that incorrectly formatted mail will take longer to be approved and may not be approved at all when we are busy.6) We will put all posts which are not included in the usual edited versions of A-Infos lists and which are not SPAM, from clear enemies or containing format problems, in a supplement list: a-infos-sup@ainfos.ca
The supplement list includes surplus posts as for content and source, posts that editor(s) think are not so interesting to anarchists, posts that a minority of editor(s) think should not be deleted, etc.
Posts on a-infos-sup have their own web page archive, and are included in the general archives of old posts.7) Editors are delegated by the A-Infos Collective to implement the guidelines and are accountable to the A-Infos Collective and to each member in it for each decision made. (The manner of accountability is like that of all members of communist libertarian/anarchist collectives delegated a task by the collective. They are accountable to its internal direct democracy of recallable delegates.)
Editors will co-ordinate their decisions about problematic posts through the a-infos-org list, which all members of the A-Infos Collective are subscribed to.