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Compare the news values operating within alternative media with those of mainstream media.

Thirty years ago to have talked about alternative media would be to conjure up images of small punk fanzines and co-operative Marxist pamphlets printed on thick yellow paper (Hebdige: 1978:112). Then the difference in news values seemed clear. Mainstream media valued news that would sell papers, and was acceptable to the institutional matrix in which the papers found themselves existing; alternative media would value news that had importance in the context of a different value system, often one that directly contested the value of mainstream news. In the age of the blog and webpage, it is no longer so easy to identify the principle differences between alternative and mainstream media: blogs and internet magazines can often support the government position (http://www.rightwingnews.com/), or function as de facto advertising boards for web based companies. This essay will argue it is no longer tenable to understand alternative media by how they value the news. Rather, for the concept to be a useful one, one must analyse the way in which news value is created. In order to do this, we will examine the structure and organisation of the two sorts of media. It will be argued that the absence of institutional pressure and the possibility for collaboration in non hierarchical networks makes alternative media qualitatively different to the mainstream media, and one can see this in the news values that operate in the respective medias.

There is indeed a difference in the news that one can read in the mainstream press and in the alternative press, but this difference is elusive if one attempts to pin it down. There is a surprising homogeneity of headlines in the mainstream press: both the independent and the guardian today (11/05/05) lead with stories about the Kashmir earthquake - seemingly understandable given the magnitude of the story, but driven by a wide uniformity of interest. Likewise, we find a bewildering selection of news in the alternative press: catering to partisan and marginal interests from Indymedia UK’s link to a story of the expulsion of sans papiers (2005) in Paris, to SavageMinds’ report about aboriginal science in its anthropological news feed. However, it is not enough to assume that these differences in news emerge from unsituated agents choosing what news they value. Rather, we must follow Foucault (1984a:100) in asserting that discourse is produced by power relations, and these power relations are rooted in institutions and power-knowledge relations.

Chomsky (1997) argues that "the elite media set a framework within which others operate." Every afternoon the larger newspapers send a memo to the smaller papers announcing what the headline will be in the next day’s paper. This agenda setting is bound up in a series of institutional relations. Most of the large papers in Britain, with the Guardian being the exception, are owned by large corporations, and this involvement within the system of production determines in part the news values mainstream media have. Furthermore, mainstream media needs to be cost-efficient, if not turn a profit, in a capitalist economy. In Britain this has led to the necessity to be first to the news, even if one does not necessarily have the best perspective. Thus journalists are parachuted into war zones without necessarily having much knowledge of the country in which they find themselves. Furthermore the constraints of the competition require stories to be as bold and shocking as possible. For example, the Daily Mail (17/02/2005) story "Our NHS, not the World Health Service," mobilised and misrepresented a minor statistic in order to produce a shocking headline which would appeal to its readership and sell as many papers as possible. In this example it is important to note the positive feedback between the hostility of the Daily Mail reader towards migrants being justified by the story, which in turns means the newspaper needs to produce even more stories of this sort to sell papers. Foucault (1984b: 35), in his work on governmentality, terms this a technique of the self: the way in which hegemonic relations are produced within the body of the subject.

These constraints must then be placed within an institutional framework, which sees journalists rely on academics and government ministers for information. Printing news which took a radically different value perspective to these institutions would endanger one’s ability to access these sources, and thus to compete with one’s rivals in the marketplace. To understand the different values alternative media give to news, we must also understand the sociology of organisation that underlies alternative media.

Atonn argues (2001) that "alternative media may be characterised by the degree to which they are de-professionalised, de-institutionalised and de-capitalised." This essay will analyse each of these claims in turn and try to see if there is a qualitative difference between the news values of alternative and mainstream media outlets.

Mainstream media employs professionals. These professionals have a series of skills they have acquired in order to do their job, and have a vested interest in keeping their job, given that their livelihood depends on it. By contrast, alternative media tends to be run on a part-time basis by people who have other specialisations. This allows a much greater freedom to choose stories, because one is not sedimented as strongly within a power-knowledge structure on which one depends. However, it should be remembered that this does not necessarily make alternative media anymore free from power relations, for instance the stories on counterpunch (2005) are incredibly politically partisan and enmeshed within the vested interests of the left, but it does mean they have more latitude to walk away from these relations. Furthermore, not being a professional journalist means that one is outside the situated habitus (Bourdieu: 1990:93) that means stories are only considered stories if they fit within certain long habituated criteria. The non-professional journalist may also have another speciality that allows him to write about a subject with a greater degree of depth than a mainstream journalist could. For instance, Eric Reeves (2005) has spent many years researching the Sudan, and compiled an extensive website that offers far more depth than a mainstream organisation could ever offer.

This line is not as firm as it might seem. Eric Reeves is now consulted by mainstream press organisations, and indeed writes for the mainstream press on occasion. Whenever there is a very successful alternative media organisation it risks being subsumed into the world of the mainstream media through professionalisation, with the incumbent risks mentioned above. Furthermore, mainstream organisations are now starting to use amateurs with excellent knowledge of the situation to write for them. For instance, the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (2005) uses local writers in conflict areas to offer expert localised reporting, and these services and then standardised through their program to build up local media.

There is however an important distinction that remains between the two sets of media in terms of professionalisation. Atton (2001) argues that "alternative media is about offering the means for democratic communication to people who are normally excluded from media production." Whatever the slippage between the two types of media, alternative media offers the possibility for participation in the public sphere to those who have previously been excluded, for reasons we shall explore below. Furthermore, the nature of news changes because of de-professionalisation. Previously, the work of the reporter was reporting, and the subject matter he or she reported was secondary to his life as a reporter. Increasingly, alternative media allows the possibility that news forms part of the textures of everyday life. Benjamin (1999:233) notes of the phenomenon of photography that "the greatly increased mass of participation has produced a change in the mode of participation." No longer is it necessary that the journalist is removed from his subject matter. Interestingly, this answers Kierkegaard’s (1977:15) criticism of newspapers, which was that they allowed people to comment without risk. Thus we see news ceasing to become a commodified abstraction and starting to become part of the texture of the everyday. This can be seen clearly in the blog, where the divide between life and the news that comments on it is increasingly irrelevant.

Many of these changes are possible because alternative media are not forced to compete in the marketplace in the same way. Marginal media is not profit driven, and is thus, in Atonn’s term, de-capitalised. If we return to the fanzine, we see that capital becomes a contingent, rather than a necessary, part of the process of production. In this context, Hebdige (1978:230) notes that old fanzine editors would make do with what they had in terms of capital, and would build the magazine on the basis of what was available, rather than the necessity of producing a commodity that could be valorised as such. Though mainstream news increasingly has free services (email bulletins, free websites) they are a phenomenon of a different order as they are still dependent on the capitalist economy for their functioning.

Perhaps the single biggest difference between the two sets of media is to be found in the differential way they organise themselves. Due in part to the institutional power relationships in which mainstream media finds itself, it is organised hierarchically, with each journalist answerable to an editor (and upwards). This system of individual responsibility means the opinions of one person (for instance the chairman of the company) can manifest a huge influence. In contrast, SchNEWS (2005), a small anarchist media outlet prides itself on being run on "disorganisation." This does not mean that nothing gets done: the booklet comes out every two weeks, and a website is maintained, so clearly there is a form of organisation. Rather, the organisation is non-hierarchical. Articles are not written by a single author, but collectively as the article is passed around the collective. Editorial decisions are taken by groups, with no one having a senior position. This does not mean there are less power relationships at play, on the contrary there are more, because so many more people have a say, but because of the collaborative process, they are less able to influence the news produced and so the news that is valued tends have less chance of being seriously biased.

The technology of the internet has made such collaboration much easier. Blogs can be seen to manifest a form of this sort of organisation. People leave comments and have arguments through the blog: in this way the news functions as a process of collective deliberation among a network of people rather than a hierarchical and asymmetric relationship between producer and consumer.

As with de-professionalisation, these lines are not as clear as they might seem. Blogs can obviously often manifest a strong form of individualism, given they can be written by one person. Furthermore, one must not assume alternative media as a category has a particular political allegiance because it tends towards forms of organisation that are not hierarchical. One can for instance have a collaborative website that suggests the best buys and is linked to a major retail website. For example, Kotaku (2005) is an alternative media resource that informs people how and where to consume video games. Indeed, with the advent of the web, we have seen a number of capitalistic modes of production attempting to reproduce non-hierarchical networks. Ebay is a case in point here: it is a company whose service relies on using such unregulated flows of information (feedback) to operate a successful company.

In this essay we have seen that in order to understand the news values of any media we must understand the underlying institutional and power-knowledge relationships that give rise to these values. There are similarities between the two sets of media, and the ease with which people may move between them. Despite this, we have shown there are qualitative differences between them which lie in the different sets of institutional and organisational relationships underlying them, which creates a different mechanism for structuring how news is valued.

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