{"title":"Creating a News Garden: Maintaining place and the role of local journalism","authors":"Gino Canella, Jason Pramas","doi":"10.1386/jacm_00114_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jacm_00114_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the relationship between local journalism and place through a case study of the Somerville News Garden, a community news initiative launched in 2019 to address the city’s failing news infrastructure. Researchers used collaborative ethnographic methods to study the News Garden from its inception in August 2019 to December 2021: we surveyed residents about their news preferences ( n = 92), interviewed eighteen residents and conducted participant observation at planning meetings and public forums hosted by the News Garden. The study addresses two themes: first, local journalism constructs and maintains place by covering location-specific issues and moving information across unfamiliar spaces; and second, community news initiatives challenge scholars and practitioners to reconsider the role of local journalism and its continued relevance in civic life. Finally, the study reviews the News Garden’s organizational structure and proposes grassroots governance : a model of news production and distribution based on collaboration and accountability in the service of democracy.","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135803447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yonty Friesem, Charlotte Duff, Teena Sloane-Hendricks
{"title":"Youth-powered or empowered: How self-determination theory can help us better understand youth media dynamics with adult facilitators during the pandemic","authors":"Yonty Friesem, Charlotte Duff, Teena Sloane-Hendricks","doi":"10.1386/jacm_00115_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jacm_00115_1","url":null,"abstract":"Youth media literature celebrates youth voice but rarely discusses the power dynamics between adult mentors and youth. This case study explores these power dynamics in cultivating trust between teenagers creating community media and their adult mentors on Chicago’s South Side. The authors identified three self-determination themes relating to these power dynamics between the youth and adults in the production process during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) generating routines to foster a sense of competency; (2) having a sense of belonging by creating caring interactions; (3) allowing participants to voice their opinion to increase their sense of autonomy. Being Black teenagers in the middle of the pandemic along with the social unrest was challenging. Creating their own media for a specific target audience in their community, instead of a cable TV channel, supported the youth’s sense of power to come intrinsically and not from the adult facilitators.","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135803469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stringers and the Journalistic Field: Marginalities and Precarious News Labour in Small-town India, Nimmagadda Bhargav (2023)","authors":"Bridget Backhaus","doi":"10.1386/jacm_00116_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jacm_00116_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Stringers and the Journalistic Field: Marginalities and Precarious News Labour in Small-town India , Nimmagadda Bhargav (2023) Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 210 pp., ISBN 978-1-03232-642-9, h/bk, AUS 201","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135803446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Strategically communicating climate crisis: How ecovillages and cohousing pursue structural change in the built environment","authors":"Jared T. Macary, Eric Kwame Adae","doi":"10.1386/joacm_00089_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00089_1","url":null,"abstract":"Climate crisis, fuelled by dominant social, political and economic structures, causes a rift in the Earth’s metabolism. In the built environment, where people live and work, social-ecological communities, such as ecovillages and cohousing, model and pursue alternative, interconnected relations with nature. This study examines five social-ecological communities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and their use of strategic communication to pursue structural change. Long interviews identified three themes and eight sub-themes through which community members influence the mainstream that surrounds them and enrich their own membership and infrastructure. This study demonstrates that postmodern approaches to strategic communication active on the local level, while in tension with modernist approaches, provide an effective means to respond to climate crisis in the built environment.","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91048356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Media activism in Brazil: Discursive strategies of Mídia Ninja1","authors":"Raul Ramalho, Kênia Maia","doi":"10.1386/joacm_00096_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00096_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the discursive content produced by the Brazilian collective Mídia Ninja on its Facebook page about a significant political event in Brazil – the habeas corpus granted (and later denied) in July 2018 to the former centre-left president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The article uses discourse analysis based on the three-dimensional model (a non-hierarchical relationship between text, discursive practice and social practice) as methodology. The research problematizes the media activism features of Mídia Ninja, arguing that the group acted in favour of Lula’s freedom based on a centralized and multimedia narrative (written texts, photos, cartoons, videos and live broadcasts) combined with a counter-hegemonic discursive strategy. This strategy elected opponents and heroes, and defined the situation as part of a coup led by the traditional media alongside sectors of political and court systems. Furthermore, the action of Mídia Ninja challenges traditional journalistic practices such as objectivity and impartiality by representing a hybrid media activism, embracing an aesthetic-enunciative freedom characteristic of free media.","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"176 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79779006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indymedia and Standing Rock: Media-historic moments","authors":"D. Kidd","doi":"10.1386/joacm_00091_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00091_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article reviews the legacy of the global Indymedia Center (IMC), a news and information network of 175 autonomous media centres that operated in every world region autonomously of the dominant corporate and public service communications and information systems. Emerging first during protests against the neo-liberal practices of the World Trade Organization, the IMC represented a media-historic moment, one of the first times that social movement media activists were able to bypass the dominant media to produce their own reports and circulate them directly to activists and supporters around the world. My review examines the composition of the IMC’s infrastructure and volunteer force, and their technological and communications repertoires in relation to the dominant communications systems, and consider their legacy in succeeding cycles of social movement contention. I then compare the legacy of the IMC with the more recent media-historic moment of the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors who in 2016 tactically employed a land-based mobilization with a movement-directed online and offline communications assemblage to mobilize against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on their traditional territory. Capturing more US and international dominant media attention than any previous Indigenous movement, and reaching even more people with their self-generated media, they countered the neo-liberal extractivist paradigm of resource exploitation and also affirmed their Indigenous sovereignty, history and knowledge systems. Finally, I summarize some of the similarities and differences between the two cases and suggest questions for further study.","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82091295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indymedia, a multi-paradigmatic case of alternative media: The interplay between media, commons and movements","authors":"P. Vatikiotis","doi":"10.1386/joacm_00094_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00094_1","url":null,"abstract":"The article probes into different perspectives of alternative media and fieldwork reflections on Indymedia project (drawing on secondary research of various Independent Media Centres [IMCs] and primary research on a ‘marginalized’ case in Indymedia network, the IMC Thessaloniki), evaluating Indymedia as a multi-paradigmatic case of alternative media developed in-between media, commons and movements.","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78225727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves, Kanchan K. Malik and Vinod Pavarala (eds) (2020)","authors":"Bridget Backhaus","doi":"10.1386/joacm_00097_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00097_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves, Kanchan K. Malik and Vinod Pavarala (eds) (2020)\u0000Abingdon and New York: Taylor & Francis, 294 pp.,\u0000ISBN 978-1-13855-853-3, h/bk, AUD 252.00","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83641366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Seeking to be heard’: The role of social and online media in advocating for the Uluru Statement from the Heart and constitutional reform in Australia","authors":"B. Fredericks, Abraham Bradfield","doi":"10.1386/joacm_00092_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00092_1","url":null,"abstract":"In 2017 the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a document outlining an Indigenous envisioned path towards constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the creation of an Indigenous ‘Voice to Parliament’, was presented to the Australian government and public. Since its creation, it has been met with a range of responses that have both welcomed and supported its reforms, as well as dismissed and rejected its overall vision. Both mainstream news and social media have played a significant role in shaping discourses surrounding the Statement. Throughout this article we discuss the often misinformed and convoluted characterization of what an Indigenous ‘Voice to Parliament’ entails. We highlight how powerful political voices – such as those of the prime minister, politicians and media moguls – dominate, distort and influence political and pubic conversations surrounding constitutional reform in Australia. Through news conglomerates’ racialized characterization of Indigenous peoples, exclusion of their voices and perspectives and a bias that neglects to hold politicians and other commentators to account, we argue that whilst the movement towards an Indigenous ‘Voice to Parliament’ is often obstructed, it is far from defeated. Increasing numbers of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, inclusive of activists, journalists, academics and lawyers, amongst others, are embracing social and news media as a means to deny and counter their exclusion. This article aims to continue a constructive conversation concerning the need for constitutional recognition through an enshrined voice that guarantees Indigenous participation within the parliamentary process. In doing so, we also call for greater scrutiny and accountability towards how the media portrays and represents Indigenous peoples and their voices.","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76765650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prisoner radio as an abolitionist tool: A scholactivist reflection","authors":"Heather Anderson, Charlotte Bedford","doi":"10.1386/joacm_00093_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00093_1","url":null,"abstract":"Prisoner and prison radio – audio production and broadcasting that services prisoner and prison communities – has existed in a variety of forms in a diverse range of countries for over 30 years and has recently seen a surge in popularity and awareness. At the same time, the prison abolition movement has also gained momentum and visibility, after an equally long presence and history. Recently in the United States, the New York City Council voted to close Rikers Island by 2026 in response to community campaigning driven by an abolition agenda. Likewise, the Black Lives Matter movement has introduced an abolitionist discourse (especially around defunding police services) to the mainstream vernacular. This article considers the relationships between broadcasters/audiences and the State – embodied through government departments responsible for managing the incarceration of its citizens, and how these impact on prisoner radio’s capacity to act as an agent of change. To do so, we take a scholactivist approach to critically reflect on our experiences as prisoner radio practitioners and researchers and consider the potentials for prisoner radio to either support or hinder a prison abolition agenda. Can the genre contribute to the prison abolition movement when it often requires the support of the prison-industrial complex to exist?","PeriodicalId":36092,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Alternative and Community Media","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78567628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}