Radical Journalism (original) (raw)

From Inside the Rhizome: Mapping the Greek Alternative Mediascape

International Journal of Communication, 2019

We use the rhizome metaphor to approach the highly elusive and contingent field of alternative media. We explore the multiplicity of alternative media practices employed by diverse social actors, critically reflecting on the rhizome’s capacity to foster cooperation and synergy, building alliances. At the empirical level, the article maps the Greek alternative mediascape; highlights the multiple paths that lead participants into it and explains the heterogeneity of the field; evaluates the diverse ways in which alternative media projects challenge hegemonic power; and explores connections within the alternative mediascape, revealing the presence of both cooperation/solidarity and isolationism/fragmentation. Last, we discuss how these findings feed back into the concept of the rhizome in the context of alternative media.

An alternative press? : new forms of news reporting in Brazil

2019

This study examines the emergence of alternative forms of news production in Brazil within the context of an increasingly unstable democracy. It focuses on different genres of not-for-profit journalism to understand the roles of alternative news producers, their relationships with traditional journalistic practices, such as the norm of objectivity, and their approach to financial sustainability. Drawing on alternative media studies, this thesis combines semi-structured interviews with independent news producers and qualitative content analysis. Interviewees include both citizen journalists and professional journalists with experience in legacy newsrooms who are now engaged with small-scale alternative news outlets. Content analysis examines the production of four cases: an independent investigative outlet that covers human rights violations; a journalism agency covering the Amazon region; a community media collective from one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas; and a feminist outle...

Intersectionality in autonomous journalism practices

Media activists who are women, queer, trans, Indigenous and/or people of colour are shifting mediascapes through intersectional autonomous journalism practices. This community-based co-research project analyses data from six semi-structured focus group workshops with media activists, who identify a contradictory logic between mainstream and alternative journalism. Two distinct autonomous journalism practices emerge that complement and extend traditional horizontal prefigurative media activist practices through an attentiveness to intersectional identities and interlocking systems of oppression. In rooted direct-action journalism, grassroots autonomous journalists collectively report from a perspective rooted in the concerns of the movement, creating media as a direct-action tactic; whereas in solidarity journalism, autonomous journalists report across movements in solidarity with intersectionally marginalised groups and communities. We argue that, emphasising intersectional mutual aid, relationship building, consent, accountability and content co-creation, these value-based practices have begun to shift dominant media and cultural logics. Finally, we offer critical reflections on some of the challenges inherent in these practices, including a meta-analysis of the intersectional value practices in our activist co-research methodology.

Radical Journalism: Lessons from Greece - Jornalismo Radical: lições da Grécia

Mediapolis, 2016

Focusing on the case of Greece, this chapter is tracing the contours of a new paradigm of radical journalism. We argue that this new paradigm is radical in five ways: in terms of its organization, in terms of the identities of its producers, in terms of its orientations vis-à-vis the political establishment and the society, in terms of its contents, and in terms of its relationship with readers and publics. Taken together these show a new radical role for journalism, focusing on addressing the present needs of a society in crisis. Journalism’s political role was far too long annexed to a Gramscian understanding of hegemony and the role of intellectuals who agitate and persuade. The rise of a new radical journalism in conditions of crisis signifies a more fundamental and organic relationship of journalism to society that requires more than agit prop. Radical journalists are not seeking to lead or to agitate or to report disconnected from society. Rather, this journalism born of the crisis and operating as critique can be seen as a journalism of praxis or doing: this is why the emphasis is more on building or restoring social relationships, rather than in legitimising existing ones as in the case of liberal journalism. This shows a new avenue and political role for journalism, in which it becomes an integral part of society and in which it is firmly oriented towards social needs.

Direct-Action Journalism: Resilience in grassroots autonomous media

Situating grassroots autonomous media within complex contemporary media ecologies and protest movements, this article uses resilience theory to critically analyse the characteristics generative of adaptive capacity in alternative media. The organizing structures, decision-making processes and social movement strategies of two case studies – Concordia University TV (CUTV) and the Montreal Media Co-op – are analysed using online self-produced media materials and participant observation during the 2012 Quebec Student Strike. Both groups have existed for more than ten years, achieving a balance between anti-authoritarian militant activist culture and formal organizational structure. We find they are open to remediation and reconfiguration as needed, including adapting new technologies and organizing journalism teams and peer-to-peer training of volunteers. In addition, these forms of ‘direct action journalism’ exhibit professionalism beyond the basic amateurism of most citizen journalism. Some of the characteristics of grassroots autonomous media production in which resilience may be cultivated include anti-authoritarian militant spaces such as CUTV’s media lab, formalized organizational structures with mixed funding models such as the Media Co-op’s multi-stakeholder cooperative, and deeper relationships and networks with social movements exhibited by both, including reconfigured horizontal relationships among media producers and users.

Comparing Digital Protest Media Imaginaries: Anti-austerity Movements in Spain, Italy & Greece

2017

This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semi-structured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social movement and communications theoretical frameworks to present a comparative critical analysis of digital protest media imaginaries. After examining the different socio-political and protest media contexts of the three countries translocally, our critical analysis emphasizes the emergence of three different imaginaries: in Spain the digital protest media imaginary was technopolitical, grounded in the politics and political economies of communication technologies emerging from the free culture movement; in Italy this imaginary was techno-fragmented, lacking cohesion, and failed to bring together old...

For a Political Economy of Indymedia Practice

Canadian Journal of Communication, 2005

This article develops a political economy of Indymedia practice. After reviewing other current approaches to the Indymedia phenomenon, democratic media activism, and traditions of dissent, I draw upon Pierre Bourdieu's unique sociological perspective to offer an analysis of the Ontario Independent Media Centre as a website of social struggles against neo-liberalism. This study reveals that Indymedia practice is a simultaneously structured and spontaneous form of collective media work on the margins of the political and journalistic fields. Whether such experiments in democratic communication will survive and develop will depend on whether Indymedia centres can become more central to the educational field.

Digital Movements: Challenging Contradictions in Intersectional Media and Social Movements

In this paper, I critically analyze four key conceptual frames for understanding contemporary autonomous digital media movements—translocal organizing, transmedia mobilizations, intersectionality, and the political economy of autonomous media. I argue that intersectionality theory is fundamental to our understanding of the online and offline actions of contemporary digital movements, and we must therefore critically analyze and account for the ways in which social movement and media activists use intersectionality in their organizing and media work. Further we must better understand how activists themselves articulate and attempt to mitigate and shift the political economies, organizational structures, media affordances, and economic exigencies of intersectional autonomous media. While these intersectional media commitments and practices are not without their challenges—complex challenges and contradictions that will be explored below—I nonetheless contend that they have been key to the success of many current social movements at the forefront of social change today. Finally I argue that the integration of intersectional politics with new technological affordances and innovations has created a key framework—intersectional technopolitics—for understanding the hybridity of digital media and social movements as part of our contemporary technosocial assemblage.

Citizen journalism and the North Belgian peace march

2009

This chapter analyses relationships between professionalism and amateurism, and between citizen journalists and activists within a civilsociety context, showing the interconnections between - and hybridity of - these discursive categories and the related mediated practices. It focuses on one specific case, related to the political, legal, military and humanitarian crisis of the Iraq war, and the (communicative) counter-strategies of the peace movement it provoked (and still provokes. The case study of a peace march organised on March 16, 2008 by the peace movement and supported by a platform of 61 organisations in North Belgium.