Alternative News Media

[Page 87]Alternative news media is a concept that describes and explains an ideologically diverse array of media activist and journalistic initiatives around the world. While the term has been used to retroactively analyze historical forms of activist reporting, including the abolitionist, labor, and women’s movement presses of the 19th century, it was initially theorized in the latter half of the 20th century. It first became widely used in the 1980s among media scholars and activists interested in explaining or lending coherence to the historical proliferation of underground and left-radical periodicals during the 1960s and 1970s.

Less useful as an ontological category than as a description of a relation, the alternative press is often considered (and its practitioners often consider themselves) vis-a-vis a more dominant or “mainstream” ...