Media, Culture & Society

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Introduction
Chris Atton and Nick Couldry
Media Culture Society 2003 25: 579
DOI: 10.1177/01634437030255001

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Introduction
Chris Atton
NAPIER UNIVERSITY, UK

Nick Couldry
LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, LONDON

Alternative media that is, media produced outside mainstream media

institutions and networks have largely been ignored by media and
cultural studies. Media, Culture & Society has been a welcome exception to
this neglect, with a series of articles published over the past two decades
(for example, Allen, 1985; Atton, 1999; Comedia, 1984; Couldry, 1999;
Cresser et al., 2001; Downing, 1988; Friedland, 1996; Halleck, 1984;
Huesca, 1995; Khiabany, 2000; Rodrguez, 1994; Sparks, 1985). This
makes Media, Culture & Society an ideal place for reassessing where
alternative media, and alternative media research, are heading today.
We are biased, of course, but our clear sense not only ours, but also
that of many others involved in the international Our Media network (http:
www.ourmedianet.org), whose first meeting in Washington DC in May
2001 generated the idea for this special issue is that the salience of
alternative media to the broad agenda of media and communication
research is growing. There are many reasons for this. None of them have to
do with notional cycles of academic interest and boredom and together they
amount to much more than the recent (maybe temporary) momentum of
publications in the field: the enlarged second edition of John Downings
classic Radical Media (Downing, 2001) and a range of completely new
research (Atton, 2002; Couldry, 2000: Part 3; Jankowski and Prehn, 2001;
Rodrguez, 2001; Streitmatter, 2001).
The reasons why alternative media might now be emerging from the
margins of scholarly attention are structural: first, the late 1990s revival of
social activism, networked on a global scale and almost always involving

Media, Culture & Society 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi), Vol. 25: 579586
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580 Media, Culture & Society 25(5)

non-mainstream media production, particularly around the so-called anti-

globalization (or better global social justice) movement, facilitated by
key technological changes (especially the growth in access to web
resources); second, the loss of momentum through the 1990s of some other
critical traditions within media and cultural studies (for example, ideologi-
cal analysis) in a sea of methodological doubt and militant particularism;
third, the near bankruptcy of Western models of democratic practice in
the face of declining voter turn-out, apathy and neoliberal appropriations of
politics as a sector of the consumer market; fourth, the not entirely
unrelated refocusing of global development institutions on the importance
of educational, social and political empowerment to local development and
global peace (witness, for example, the recent high-profile anxieties about
the globalization process expressed by George Soros and former World
Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, as well as the longer-term and more
deeply worked-out challenge to neoliberal discourse by the Nobel Prize-
winning economist Amartya Sen). Alternative media practices unusual
current salience to media and communications and indeed to wider social
science research agendas derives from the fact that it has something to
say about all these issues, both theoretically and empirically.
Alternative media practitioners, after all, are those who are not satisfied
with the exclusion from the means of symbolic production which is most
media audiences lot. They insist on being involved and, while of course
there are many reasons for involvement in media production, some involve
a desire for a political voice, and of these some are connected with a desire
for radical social change. There are different definitions of this object of
research alternative media (Atton, 2002), radical media (Downing,
2001), citizens media (Rodrguez, 2001) but, regardless of the terms
used, few involved in this field would disagree with Clemencia
Rodrguezs recent argument that at stake in the whole range of alternative
media practice is the issue of citizenship in some sense: what are the
conditions under which citizens in the 21st century can expect to be
engaged in politics, on whatever scale, and what do the resources of media
production and media consumption contribute to those conditions?
At the same time, wider pressures are creating a global forum where
something of this debate can be translated for a wider policy and activist
audience. The coming World Summit on the Information Society to be
chaired by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) in December
2003 is hardly motivated by a concern for citizenship much more like a
concern to ensure the stabilization of current patterns of dominance over
the growing global telecommunications market but at least it provides a
small opening for debate where various aspects of the critical media
research agenda can plausibly claim a right to speak, including critical
media policy analysis (see for example Calabrese and Burgelman, 1999)
and alternative media research. So there is both a long-term momentum

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Atton & Couldry, Introduction to Special Issue 581

and a short-term focus to justify critical media and communications

researchers looking more closely at what is going on currently in the
alternative media field.
Whatever the opportunities, there is no value however in a renewed
focus that fails to be critical. If the above argument is right and alternative
media constitute a media practice that is particularly embedded in wider
social processes of civic engagement, then to research it involves particular
challenges far beyond the ken of classic measure and tell mass commun-
ications research, challenges which grow as the sheer range of media
resources potentially available to non-mainstream producers grows. Each of
the four articles in this special issue addresses this challenge.
James Gilletts study of Canadian alternative press is centred around
HIV/AIDS-related health information provision in the 1990s and, by its
very choice of topic, confronts the entanglements of often quite straight-
forward production processes (newsletters, information videos) in far from
simple social contexts: how to think about influencing the self-image of
HIV/AIDS suffers and their families and friends? How to channel
information effectively with limited resources, while negotiating the shift-
ing pressures of government health discourse and economically driven
institutionalization? As in other studies of alternative media (cf. Jankowski
and Prehn, 2001; Rodrguez, 2001) the community context of alternative
media is paramount, here in the tentative construction of what Gillett calls
fora of lay knowledge. Yet these alternative-media producers sometimes
lacked crucial information about their audiences specific needs and
responses.
This gap between media practice and its actual audience is not unique to
alternative media. On the contrary, the reliance of mainstream journalists
on an imaginary rather than real relationship to their public was noted in
early sociologies of journalism (for example, Schlesinger, 1978). It does,
however, as John Downing points out in his article, become a particularly
acute problem in the case of alternative media, which is supposed above all
to be about a closer relationship between the production and reception
processes. Yet, as Downing argues, we know very little about the reception
of alternative media. Even what we do know which may illuminate the
embedding of alternative media in particular social movements leaves
key questions unanswered; for example, how are alternative media con-
sumed beyond the close-knit circle of specialist producers and consumers?
How are alternative media connected with, or even just correlated with, the
other media that both specialist and wider audiences of alternative media
consume? What exactly are the links between alternative media and
political practice or political empowerment once we move beyond the
specialists most involved in their production? An important step forward
here is Clemencia Rodrguezs recent work on citizens media (2001)
which has succeeded in displacing part of the force of these questions on to

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582 Media, Culture & Society 25(5)

the study of the broader cultural empowerment in which that specialist

audience is engaged. Here we are at the edge of a whole field of new
research questions which, as Downing argues, will have to be studied with
great historical sensitivity and surely within an expanding comparative
focus.
A feature of some, but by no means all, work on alternative media has
been to insist that we should never remain satisfied with a media-centric
approach (Downing, 2001; cf. generally Martin-Barbero, 1993). Our
engagement with, or disengagement from, media is never just a matter of
media factors. Patricia Gibbss article on the working conditions and
practices of the Honolulu Weekly, a Hawaiian alternative arts, enter-
tainments and politics weekly, brings out clearly the dangers of media-
centrism built into some optimistic readings of alternative media. As Gibbs
explains, the struggle to obtain legitimation for non-mainstream media
under difficult cultural and economic conditions may be accompanied by
blindness on the part of the leading players to the material conditions of the
production process: low wages, poor working conditions and lack of
accountability for those conditions, leading to high staff turnover. To judge
whether a particular alternative media outlet is genuinely oppositional or
radical makes little sense if done in isolation from a study of the actual
relations of production on which that media outlet is based.
John Caldwells piece pushes this type of question one stage further by
interrogating the conditions under which the committed alternative media
scholar and activist comes into contact with the social world, in this case a
documentarist seeking to address the poverty and multi-layered social
segregation experienced by migrant workers in Southern California.
Caldwells practice and argument, since they cross community borders
(even if at the same time they note how those boundaries are reproduced in
the detailed conditions the author himself faces in making his film), take
the definition of alternative media practice into a problematic area it has
rarely entered before. But his step is a necessary one if alternative media
research is to have any relevance to the worlds many zones of bitter inter-
and intra-community conflict. Like Kamal Visweswaran (1994) in her
study of the uncertain and sometimes contradictory homework behind the
professional face of the anthropologist abroad, Caldwell raises difficult
and unsettling issues about how exactly alternative media is constructed
as an alternative and critical object of research. At the same time, he
looks closely at the increasingly central notion of interactivity a key
myth of the digital media era, but one which is itself available for re-
thinking within the wider context of community practice.
Questions over the construction of alternative media as an object of
research leads us to consider the relationship between the academy and
practitioners. It seems clear to us that to study alternative media is to take
up a particular position both in relation to that object and in relation to our

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Atton & Couldry, Introduction to Special Issue 583

proximate intellectual locus, the university. Regarding the academy, this is

not to say that the choice of study forces celebratory, uncritical essays (as
Downings contribution here makes plain), yet political choices are being
made. Alternative media practitioners can be very suspicious, particularly
those working anti-intellectually, those activists for whom writing and
reporting take second place to social action (Atton, 2002: ch. 5). What has
the academy to offer them other than a bit part in a thesis or a footnote in
an overwrought theoretical construct? Yet, just as we find a blurring of
producers and audiences in alternative media practices, we might look for
blurring or, rather, hybridization at some level for our academic practice.
For example, the practitioners who participated in the 2002 Our Media
symposium at the IAMCR (International Association for Media and
Communication Research) conference in Barcelona identified urgent needs
for evaluative research into audience reach, effective methods of commun-
ication and community impact.
A useful hybrid of critical and administrative research practices may be
emerging, coming from the academy but contextualized and constituted
within the various alternative public spheres which alternative media
projects seek to create and maintain. One of us (Chris Atton) was recently
invited to run workshops on media training at a national gathering of
environmental activists; our own critical training in the social construction
of news enabled us to present the routinized and professionalized traditions
of newswork not simply as topics for seminar discussion but as practical
demonstrations of symbolic power. Media training for activists can thus
become a training in oppositional media strategies, both within and outside
the mass media.
Similar approaches can be essayed within the academy. There is an
increasing number of courses and modules that deal with alternative media,
and our own and others (including some of the contributors to this issue)
experiences of teaching such courses suggest that students welcome such
opportunities. At a general level, conceptual and theoretical explorations of,
for instance, the social construction of knowledge and other ways of
thinking about representing and being in the world need not be indeed
are not unique to courses on alternative media studies. Yet the specific
concerns and applications of these themes within alternative media non-
hierarchical methods of organization, media organizations that exist
outside the corporate division of labour and capital, activist-journalists who
experiment with non-routinized, unprofessionalized methods of doing
newswork, audiences that can become contributors, the superseding of
expert knowledge offer rigorous challenges to the deep structural,
institutionalized and professionalized power relations of the mass media.
Against this background, the study of alternative media affords us an
opportunity to introduce radical forms of criticism and reflexivity into
media education.

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584 Media, Culture & Society 25(5)

Much remains to be done. Perhaps the greatest challenge to alternative

media research lies in how the World Wide Web is being used. James
Carey (1998), in analysing the rise of national media, has identified two
complementary forces. The first he terms a centripetal force in social
organization (Carey 1998: 30) through which the national media control
space and centralize power and authority. At the same time, and against
this, came a centrifugal force, through which specialized or minority
media indexed the progressive differentiation of social structures (1998:
30). Forces and relations are working on a global scale to produce both a
consolidated, centripetal structuring of the Internet and a centrifugal
fracturing (accompanied by spasmodic connection and reticulation) of what
Carey terms the diaspora of the Internet (1998: 34).
Work has already begun; contributions by Atton (2003), Couldry
(forthcoming), Cresser et al. (2001), Curran (forthcoming), Villereal Ford
and Gil (2001) offer some early insights into how web-based media are
being used to explore issues such as sexuality, identity and politics.
Indymedias (http://www.indymedia.org) diffuse, decentralized network
suggests a significant future for alternative media projects. Lightly organ-
ized by a small collective which privileges the creative freedom of its
contributors, Indymedias non-hierarchical methods of organization and its
democratization of production techniques encourages thousands of con-
tributors, all taking responsibility for their own work. This global network
of native reporters has only become possible through the radical deploy-
ment of Internet technology. It has become a largely self-sustaining
medium, one that appears to have successfully overcome the problem of
economies of scale that have for so long bedevilled print-based alternative
media projects. To consider Indymedia as an organization is to consider a
network of independent, collectively-run nodes through which independ-
ent journalists may circulate their work, largely unimpeded by the
gatekeeping of those collectives. It is not only the scale (in terms of
geographical spread, global reach and volume of material) that makes the
Indymedia network an interesting moment for the study of alternative
media; it is the most thorough working-out on the Internet of the conditions
and processes of alternative media projects.
We must be careful not to consider this alternative Internet as if it were
entirely separate from the practices and processes that we might term the
dominant Internet. Just as Downing (2001: ix) has acknowledged that his
earlier binarist approach to radical and mainstream media prevented him
from seeing more finely graded positions, the study of Internet practices
within alternative media needs to take account of the relations of power
that are continually re-created through the deployment of a market- and
engineer-driven technology. We might think of alternative media on the
Internet as part of Careys diaspora, yet this diaspora is one which is

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Atton & Couldry, Introduction to Special Issue 585

intimately linked to and can only be understood in relation to the

macro-economic and social dimensions of the Internet as a mass medium.

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Chris Atton is Reader in Journalism at the School of Communication Arts,

Napier University, Scotland. He is the author of Alternative Literature and
Alternative Media. His third book, An Alternative Internet, will be
published by Edinburgh University Press in 2004.
Address: School of Communication Arts, Craighouse Campus, Napier
University, Edinburgh, EH10 5LG, Scotland, UK. [email: c.atton@napier.
ac.uk]

Nick Couldry is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the

London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of
Inside Culture, The Place of Media Power and Media Rituals.
Address: LSE, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK. [email:
n.couldry@lse.ac.uk]

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