Sociology Compass 1/1 (2007): 1727, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00005.

Current Issues in Alternative Media Research

Chris Atton*
School of Creative Industries, Napier University

Abstract

Research in alternative media has burgeoned since the turn of the millennium. The majority of studies has examined the political and social dimensions of alternative media and has focused on the media of social movements. The value of these amateur media projects lies not only in the content they produce, but also in the educational and political empowerment they offer to their participants. Other forms of alternative media, such as blogs and fanzines, present challenges to mainstream journalism; they challenge the exclusive authority and expertise of professional journalists. Recent research has begun to examine the relationship between alternative and mainstream media practices, particularly examining how alternative media offer ways of rebalancing media power and how ordinary people are able to represent their own lives and experiences and concerns in ways that are often ignored or marginalised by the dominant media institutions. However, we need to learn more about specic alternative media practices and how audiences use their content.

The study of alternative media has expanded enormously since the turn of the millennium: it is now taught in universities across the world as part of programmes in communication, journalism, media, politics, popular music and sociology. Its literature is continually expanding and student textbooks are emerging (Atton and Hamilton forthcoming; Waltz 2005). While it has yet to have its own journal (although that is surely not far away), media journals have devoted special issues to alternative media research (e.g. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 2003; Media, Culture and Society 2003; Media History 2001; Media International Australia 2002). In this short time, we have seen numerous case studies of contemporary alternative media projects as well as more wide-ranging historical essays (some of which are discussed below). Most signicant, perhaps, have been developments in theorising the eld, which, of course, have implications for the study of practice (what practices to study and in what ways). Despite these advances the eld continues as a contested terrain, although consensus does seem to be emerging. This paper examines the nature of both contest and consensus, as well as their relationship, in the study
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of alternative media. In doing so, it reveals not only the current state of research but directions for its future. The rst step in this examination, however, is to outline the roots of the arguments about how to understand alternative media. The scope of the eld Alternative media are produced outside mainstream media institutions and networks. They can include the media of protest groups, dissidents, fringe political organisations, even fans and hobbyists (Atton 2004, 3). They tend not to be produced by professionals, but by amateurs who typically have little or no training or professional qualications as journalists: they write and report from their position as citizens, as members of communities, as activists or as fans. Much of the work of alternative media is concerned with representing the interests, views and needs of underrepresented groups in society. Alternative media also seek to redress what their producers consider an imbalance of media power in mainstream media, which results in the marginalisation (at worst, the demonisation) of certain social and cultural groups and movements. As well as being homes for radical content, alternative media projects also tend to be organised in non-mainstream ways, often non-hierarchically or collectively, and almost always on a non-commercial basis. In these ways they hope to be independent of the market and immune to institutionalisation. While it is clearly possible to present a concise denition, for those encountering alternative media studies for the rst time there might appear to be a bewildering array of terms, concepts and denitions. To make matters more confusing, not all of these include the word alternative. We rst need to outline the range of terms employed and what they are intended to signify. We shall nd that their differences lie less in the denitions they imply and more in the emphasis they place on how to conceptualise media and communication, and how the terms relate to social and cultural practices. In addition to alternative media, we will nd terms such as alternative journalism, citizen journalism, citizens media, community media, democratic media, emancipatory media, radical media and social movement media. The range of specic forms is even greater and includes newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, as well as blogs and other websites; pamphlets and posters; fanzines and zines; grafti and street theatre; songs and music; independent book publishing; and independent record production. There is not space to examine all these terms and forms here. Instead, the rest of this paper will present the dominant concepts that are current in the eld: radical media, social movement media, citizens media and citizen journalism. It will critically assess these concepts, before going on to discuss their limits and how future research might be developed to take account of those limits.
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Radical and social movement media John Downings 1984 book, Radical Media, is generally considered as the starting point for contemporary studies in the eld. He restricted himself to the classic media forms of print and broadcast. The subtitle of this work, The Political Experience of Alternative Communication, effectively set the agenda for subsequent studies. Downing argued that the value of alternative media lay in their potential for social and political change. He considered these radical media as the media of social movements, produced by political activists for specic political and social change. This approach signalled an interest in considering media as radical to the extent that they explicitly shape political consciousness through collective endeavour (Enzensberger 1976). The revised edition of Radical Media (Downing et al. 2001) draws on a much wider range of media forms, including 18th- and 19th-century political cartooning in Britain, German labour songs of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and 19th-century African American public festivals. Woodcuts, yers, photomontage, posters, murals, street theatre and grafti are also examined for their radical methods and messages. However, a principal argument remains: that the media of these movements are important not only for what they say but for how they are organised. What Downing terms rebellious communication does not simply challenge the political status quo in its news reports and commentaries: it challenges in the ways it is produced. If the aim of radical media is to effect social or political change, then it is crucial, Downing says, that they practice what they preach. He conceptualises this as pregurative politics (a term popularised by Epstein 1991), which he understands as the attempt to practice socialist principles in the present, not merely to imagine them for the future (Downing et al. 2001, 71). To achieve this, Downing proposes a set of alternatives in principle that draw on anarchist philosophy. This leads him to emphasise the importance of encouraging contributions from as many interested parties as possible, in order to emphasise the multiple realities of social life (oppression, political cultures, economic situations) (Downing 1984, 17). Radical media, thus, come to constitute a major feature of an alternative public sphere (Downing 1988) or, as the diversity of projects suggests, many alternative public spheres (Fraser 1992; Negt and Kluge 1972/1983). Citizens media Like Downing, Clemencia Rodriguez (2000) has argued that independent media enable ordinary citizens to become politically empowered. For her, when people create their own media they are better able to represent themselves and their communities. She sees these citizens media as projects of self-education. She draws particularly on Paulo Freires (1970)
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theories of conscientization and critical pedagogy, and Chantal Mouffes (1992) notion of radical democracy. Like Downing before her, Rodriguez argues that alternative media do not only have a counter-information role. Her coining of the term citizens media is signicant: it refers to those members of society who actively participate in actions that reshape their own identities, the identities of others, and their social environment, [through which] they produce power (Rodriguez 2000, 19). Rodriguez does not consider citizens media as media in a classic sense, as communication intended to inform and inuence people. Instead she focuses on communication as social interaction. My own work (e.g. Atton 2002, 2004) has also emphasised the social processes and relations that might be developed through the production of alternative media, but it has been careful not to lose sight of media content. Similarly, Carroll and Hackett (2006) have nuanced the articulation between three outcomes of social movement media (which they term democratic media activism). First, democratic media activism functions not simply [as] a political instrument but [as] a collective good (p. 88), to the extent that its content promotes democratic conversations (ibid.). Second, it treats communication as simultaneously means and ends of struggle (p. 96) to enable the building of identity (whether individual or collective). Third, it offers not simply a symbolic challenge (through its content) to mass communication, but a challenge to the political economy of mass communication itself (p. 99) through its alternative, democratic structures. Challenges to media power Nick Couldry (2000) has taken this last argument further still. He has argued that challenges to media power do not necessarily always take place within practices of media production. His studies of protests in England (such as those at Greenham Common against the US air base there or at Brightlingsea against live exports of veal calves) show how, even without creating their own media, citizens are able to register their presence and challenge the common sense separation between ordinary people and events in mediated public places (Vatikiotis 2004, 20). Amateur media practices are always embedded in everyday life practices; they are therefore already located in broader political, economic, social and cultural contexts. For this reason, I preferred the terms alternative media and alternative journalism to describe these practices (Atton 2002, 2003a). As Nick Couldry and James Curran (2003, 7) have argued, alternative media functions as a comparative term to indicate that whether indirectly or directly, media power is what is at stake. We can therefore examine amateur media practices for examples of how the mass media representations we take for granted may be challenged and disrupted. Nick Couldry argues that alternative media projects result in the de-naturalisation of dominant media spaces (the mainstream).
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Amateur media producers play an important role in rebalancing the power of the media. Couldry (2000, 25) argues that the media themselves are a social process organised in space and therefore may be challenged by other kinds of social processes, such as more inclusive and democratic forms of media production. This argument suggests that alternative media are able to construct realities that oppose the conventions and representations of the mainstream media. This develops Pierre Bourdieus (1991) position, that symbolic power is the power to construct reality. Participatory, amateur media production contests the concentration of institutional and professional media power and challenges the media monopoly on producing symbolic forms. Therefore, to consider alternative media is to recognise the relationship between dominant, professionalised media practices and marginal, amateur practices. The struggle between them is for the place of media power (Couldry 2000). The emphasis on alternative media as oppositional projects, however, has until recently tended to obscure the relationship between the amateur and the professional. This relationship is particularly relevant when we consider alternative media as forms of journalism, an area of research that has only recently been developed. Blogs and citizen journalism Donald Matheson (2004) is one researcher who has moved the focus of alternative media studies away from the social movement and the community and has instead looked at more individual responses to the world. His study of blogs is important because it shows how political analysis may be considered as a personal response that has a public, at times even a global, reach. This is not a new practice within mainstream journalism: we are familiar enough with the opinion columns and commentaries in our daily newspapers. Blogs, however, democratise what has long been the province of the accredited expert (such as the professional politician and the journalist) by enabling the ordinary contributions of people outside the elite groups that usually form the pool for opinion and comment. These amateur commentators draw not on formal, academic or political expertise but instead write from personal experience. Their authority comes from their subjective engagement with the issues and events they are discussing. Bloggers construct their narratives using language, discourse and examples that are familiar to their audiences. These features are already evident in alternative media that are produced by social movements and communities, but there are two signicant differences in the case of blogs. First, generally speaking, bloggers seek audiences beyond the already committed: they do not necessarily expect to be preaching to the politically converted. Studies such as those by Matheson argue less for alternative media that empower their producers, although this is still important. Instead, blogs produce a public form of journalism
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that engages with a wider public. How blogs achieve this brings us to the second difference, which is concerned with journalism practice. The study of blogs vividly demonstrates the problem of objectivity in mainstream journalism. Journalism that seeks to separate facts from values has long been the subject of critique. For example, Edgar has argued that journalism cannot be objective, for that presupposes that an inviolable interpretation of the event as action exists prior to the report (1992, 120). Alternative media practices that challenge objectivity do not, therefore, only emphasise their role in self-education, community empowerment and the setting up of challenges to the dominant institutions of professional communication. They offer a challenge to the professional practices of journalism. At an epistemological level, to consider the practices of alternative media producers as alternative journalism is to critique the ethics, norms and routines of professionalised journalism (Atton 2003a; Atton and Wickenden 2005; Harcup 2003). Alternative journalism will tend, through its very practices, to examine notions of truth, reality, objectivity, expertise, authority and credibility (Atton 2003b). Historical perspectives, such as those of James Hamilton (2003), have found examples that pre-date a notion of journalism centred on specialisation, professional status and individual identity. In modern journalism, the use of blogs by professional journalists has encouraged a reassessment of journalistic processes with mainstream media organisations (Lowrey 2006). At a practical level, recent studies have shown the rise of citizen journalism as part of mainstream news gathering. Breaking television news frequently relies on camcorder footage, photographs taken on mobile phones and other forms of citizen journalism (Sampedro Blanco 2005). Newspapers and broadcasters routinely incorporate blogs into their websites; some solicit advice and recommendations for stories and programmes from audiences. As Mark Deuze has pointed out (drawing on the work of Henry Jenkins 2006), much of this community-oriented and sometimes participatory media-making takes place within the walls of mainstream and distinctly commercial media organizations (Deuze 2006, 272). The limits of the eld Compared to the work on political alternative media, relatively little attention has been paid to alternative media that deal with popular culture. This is especially the case with publications produced by enthusiasts and fans (fanzines). The fanzine shares much with its professional counterpart, popular cultural journalism. For instance, the roots of the popular music press in the UK and the USA lie not in professionalised journalism but in the amateur, underground press of the late 1960s (Gudmundsson et al. 2002). There is a signicant similarity between the fan as amateur writer and the professional writer as fan. This says much about expert culture in popular criticism, where knowledge and authority proceed not from formal,
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educational or professional training but primarily from autodidactic, amateur enthusiasm. Once again, we see the privileging of the ordinary voice. The circulation of knowledge within a like-minded community further develops expertise and cultural capital. Such a display of expert knowledge can challenge professional notions of expert authority. While fan culture in general is served well by the academy, studies of fanzines are less numerous. Duncombes (1997) study of American fanzines and zines examines their social and cultural dimensions. Other studies have examined the visual language of fanzines (Triggs 1995), their value discourses (Atton 2001) and specic genres (Atton 2006a; Etienne 2003). The privileging of participation in alternative media as if it were the sole end of such media practices is often to the detriment of any consideration of how alternative media seek their audiences and what use these audiences make of media content. This is particularly important in the case of the media of social movements, which have political communication at their heart. What political impact do these media have, both on their producers and on their audiences? Who, after all, are their audiences? We know little about them (Downing 2003). We need audience studies not only to discover how alternative media are used (to what extent and in what ways do these media mobilise audiences?), but also to problematise the notion of audiences in contexts where audiences may take on the roles of producers and participants as well as being users. This hybrid notion is at odds with long-standing conceptualisations of the audience as consumers; it even goes beyond the active audience approach, where audiences make oppositional readings of media texts that originate in the mass media (Fiske 1992). James Hamilton has argued that this division between producer and consumer is relatively recent. His historical work shows that media participation pre-dates these specialised roles and that we should consider a multidimensional [view that] is meant to emphasise ... a conception of media participation as varied, hybrid and, in many cases, not identiable at all from within an evaluative framework that allows only producers and consumers (Hamilton 2003, 297). Existing studies also have political limits. The bulk of research into alternative and citizen journalism examines political media that are progressive in their ideology and aims: there is an emphasis on socialist and anarchist projects. To date there are few studies of what Downing et al. (2001, 88) have termed repressive radical media or of the use of alternative media forms for discriminatory ends (e.g. Atton 2006b; Back 2002; OLoan, Poulter and McMenemy 2005). Even fewer studies have critically examined progressive media in terms of their repressive aspects, such as the advocacy of violence (Atton 1999 is an exception). Furthermore, there is a bias towards political projects in the USA and Western Europe. Rodriguez is the only researcher to work consistently in Latin America (although Robert Huesca and Alan OConnor have also done work here; for example, Huesca 1995; OConnor 2004). Although
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there are numerous studies of Indymedia, an international, anti-globalisation news network (such as Downing 2002; Kidd 2003; Platon and Deuze 2003), they have tended to ignore the networks specic regional and national practices. There are occasional studies from Asia, such as Kim and Hamiltons (2006) examination of the South Korean, online citizen journalism project OhmyNEWS. Studies of the Middle East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent are few: Gumucio Dagrons (2001) 50 brief case stories attest to the diversity of citizen journalism projects in Africa and the Indian subcontinent. There is a need not only for these cases to be examined in greater depth, but also for comparative work to be undertaken. This is particularly important in regions where the writ of the Western norms of journalism does not run and, therefore, where the challenges for alternative media might be culturally and politically very different. Finally, the intersection between alternative and mainstream media forms suggests that we need to consider journalism practices. We have observed how alternative media challenge professionalised notions of objectivity, authority and expertise. To complement this critique, we need studies that ask questions about the nature of journalistic practices in alternative media. We need to examine the ways in which practitioners work. How do they learn to become journalists or editors? How do they identify and choose their stories? How do they select and represent their sources? Are alternative journalists truly independent, or are their working methods inuenced by the practices of mainstream journalists? These are questions about media practice that require an understanding of its practitioners: their values, motivations, attitudes, ideologies, history, education and relationships. Conclusion This overview has shown the variety of perspectives and forms that comprise the study of alternative media. The participatory media of social movements and communities aim to achieve social and political change. In these instances, we saw how the experience of media production and organisation can be as important as the communication of messages. This is particularly the case with citizens media, where the emphasis is more on self-education and community building than on reaching out to audiences. This is less the case with the personal-political medium of blogs, where inuence and persuasion are more apparent. Through the challenges they make to professional notions of objectivity, expertise and credibility, blogs suggest ways of re-imagining journalism as a dialogical, public medium. The increasing use of blogs along with the use of ordinary people as sources and news gatherers by the mainstream media shows how alternative media may never be entirely separate from their dominant counterparts. Research into fanzines also indicates the common roots of amateur and professional cultural journalism. What all forms of
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alternative media have in common and where they most explicitly connect with mainstream media is a struggle over media power. What does it mean to be a media producer, a journalist and a public communicator? These are the questions at the heart of current research into alternative media. If alternative media matter at all, it is because media power matters. Alternative media offer opportunities for participating in the world that go far beyond the narrow conceptions of citizens as passive consumers and marginal players in politics and culture. They offer the means to a properly active citizenship. For all the diversity of approaches we have encountered in this review, there is general agreement among scholars that was is at stake in this eld ... is the issue of citizenship in some sense (Atton and Couldry 2003, 580, original emphasis). What we must now understand is how practitioners do their work and how audiences use that work. Finally, and to close the circuit, we might ask: how do those audiences then become media producers? Short Biography Chris Attons research into alternative media is interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, journalism, cultural studies, politics and studies in popular music. He is the author of three books and has published papers in The Journal of Mundane Behavior; Journalism Studies; Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism; Media, Culture & Society; New Media and Society; Popular Music; Social Movement Studies; the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World; and the International Encyclopedia of Communication, among many others. He is a frequent contributor to edited collections and has edited special issues on alternative media for Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism and Media, Culture and Society. He is currently researching the nature of sectarianism in football fanzines and on supporters websites. He is also researching audiences of community media in Scotland. His next book (Alternative Journalism) will be co-authored with James Hamilton and will be published by Sage in 2008. Before obtaining his readership in 2003, he was a lecturer in information and media in Napier Universitys School of Communication Arts. He holds MAs from the Universities of Edinburgh and Leicester and a PhD from Napier University. Note
* Correspondence address: School of Creative Industries, Napier University, Craighouse Road, Edinburgh EH10 5LG, UK. Email: c.atton@napier.ac.uk.

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