Alternative Press.pdf

A reassessment of the alternative press

Chris Atton

DEPARTMENT OF PRINT MEDIA , COMMUNICATION AND PUBLISHING , NAPIER UNIVERSITY ,

EDINBURGH

Introduction: deﬁning the alternative press

The editors of Alternatives in Print suggested three simple criteria by

which to deﬁne alternative publishers. They held that a publisher might be

thought of as alternative if it met at least one of the following:

1. The publisher has to be non-commercial, demonstrating that ‘a basic concern

for ideas, not the concern for proﬁt, is the motivation for publication.’

2. The subject matter of their publications should focus on ‘social responsibility

or creative expression, or usually a combination of both.’

3. Finally, it is enough for publishers to deﬁne themselves as alternative

publishers. ( Alternatives in Print , 1980: vii)

But such apparently simple criteria lead to an extremely inclusive deﬁni-

tion that is no more helpful than the negative deﬁnition summarized by

Comedia: ‘it is not the established order; it is not the capitalist system; it is

not the mainstream view of a subject . . . or it is simply not the

conventional way of doing something’ (Comedia, 1984: 95). Where, then,

do we draw the line between the mainstream press and the alternative

press? A narrower deﬁnition was proposed by the Royal Commission on

the Press (1977) in its report on the British alternative press:

1. an alternative publication deals with the opinions of small minorities;

2. it expresses attitudes ‘hostile to widely-held beliefs’;

3. it ‘espouses views or deals with subjects not given regular coverage by

publications generally available at newsagents’.

The Commission went on to emphasize the potential value of ‘[a]

multiplicity of alternative publications [that] suggest dissatisfaction with an

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Media, Culture & Society 21(1)

insufﬁciently diverse established press, and an unwillingness or inability on

the part of major publications to provide space for the opinions of small

minorities’ (1977: 40). But this deﬁnition is also contentious. The size of

minority audiences is debatable (the alternative press has published and

continues to publish for some large minorities – the gay and lesbian press

is one such). And, in the light of mass protest movements, it is arguable

whether such views as are propounded in the alternative press are not in

fact ‘widely-held’. What none of the previous deﬁnitions does is adumbrate

the differences between alternative media themselves, and establish criteria

that go beyond the simple ‘alternative to . . .’ formulation (which always

begs the question, ‘alternative to what?’). With these considerations in

mind, Michael Traber has embraced a notion of alternative media that do

not have communication (of ‘facts’, of opinions) as their primary aim, but

instead social and political action:

The aim is to change towards a more equitable social, cultural and economic

whole in which the individual is not reduced to an object ( of the media or the

political powers) but is able to ﬁnd fulﬁlment as a total human being. (Traber,

1985: 3; emphases added)

Traber argues that the conventions of the mass media marginalize the role

of the ‘simple man and woman’, foregrounding instead the rich, the

powerful and the glamorous. The former are only regarded as observers or

marginal commentators on events (such as in the ‘vox pop’ interview); they

only achieve prominence when they are the actors in a situation that is

bounded by values such as conﬂict or the bizarre. Moreover, he identiﬁes

two broad areas of the alternative press: the advocacy press and the

grassroots press. The alternative advocacy press adopts very different news

values from the mass media, introducing:

. . . alternative social actors [such as] the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized

and indeed the ordinary manual labourer, woman, youth and child as the main

subjects of [their] news and features. (Traber, 1985: 2)

But it is the grassroots press that offers the most thoroughgoing version of

alternative news values. It is produced by the same people whose concerns

it represents, giving a position of engagement and direct participation. This

need not preclude the involvement of professionals, but they will be ﬁrmly

in the role of advisors; their presence being to enable the ‘ordinary people’

to produce their own work, independent of professional journalists and

editors. This is to propose a model of the alternative media that goes well

beyond the left-liberal, reformist construction of the alternative advocacy

press. It is Traber’s deﬁnition that will be employed in the following study

and, as will be seen, it affords a useful perspective from which to examine

the contemporary alternative press. 1

Atton, A reassessment of the alternative press

The alternative press in its ‘ghetto’

Traber’s desiderata have not been accepted without criticism from some

commentators on the alternative press. The most forthright critique has

been the Comedia group’s pessimistic assessment of the alternative press.

Though now over ten years old, its analysis of the ‘failure’ of the

alternative press has not been signiﬁcantly added to (nor argued against) in

the ensuing decade. This failure, the group argued, was due to the inability

or unwillingness of the alternative press to adopt methods of ﬁnancial

planning and organizational efﬁciency that would enable it to survive in the

market place. Comedia’s solution for the ‘underdeveloped’ alternative press

found a panacea in mainstream economic and organizational planning (that

is, using conventional managerial means) and a shift of content in order to

increase circulation by moving more into the mainstream. Comedia was

certainly accurate that a cavalier approach to ﬁnances, coupled with non-

hierarchical forms of organization, has characterized the history of the

alternative press. Where there is scope for argument is to the extent that

such attitudes inevitably lead to ‘failure’.

The espousal by the alternative press of anti-commercial methods is still

found today, as a deliberate choice on the part of such publications to

demonstrate their practical commitment to their political strategy, one that

is against capitalism and managerialism. According to Comedia, this choice

dooms the alternative press to ‘an existence so marginal as to be

irrelevant’, never to break out of its ‘alternative ghetto’.

The only alternative publications that can be considered successful are

those that have broken out of the ghetto and have attracted signiﬁcant parts

of the mainstream audience (Comedia cited New Internationalist and New

Socialist ).

Comedia held that such non-hierarchical, collective methods can only

disadvantage the alternative press, because they are always adopted for

political, never for economic, ends. Success can only be judged against

increased circulation and increased market penetration. The very subtitle of

its paper (‘the development of underdevelopment’) implied that the

alternative press is by its very nature in a subordinate position to that of the

mainstream press. This analysis is similar to that found in studies of earlier

periods of the British alternative press (Fountain, 1988; Nelson, 1989). In

his study of the British underground press, Nigel Fountain (1988) called

ﬁnance and distribution ‘those two great rocks of the underground’ and

notes that even by the time of The Leveller (founded in 1976), the

alternative press had not solved these problems (1988: 198). ( The Lev-

eller’ s problems are examined in detail by Landry et al., 1985.) Summariz-

ing the dominant problems of the underground and alternative press from

the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Fountain identiﬁed them as ‘internal

organisation, distribution and sales’ (1988: 198). Similar conclusions were

Media, Culture & Society 21(1)

reached by the Comedia group’s predecessor, the Minority Press Group, in

its series of reports (especially Minority Press Group, 1980a, 1980b and

Whitaker, 1981). All have in common their accounts of the low-waged,

underfunded editors and workers of the alternative press; all emphasize

how marginal and precarious an existence many papers had. From such

literature a picture emerges of an alternative press that has wrestled with

the problems of democratic participation in the production of its titles and

that has found itself repeatedly in ﬁnancial crisis. In addition, it has

suffered from low visibility in the marketplace through its problems with

distribution, which has further increased its ﬁnancial problems. Circulation,

and therefore ﬁnance, have remained low.

Current contexts for the British alternative press

Though Comedia’s perspective appears to dominate the studies of the

alternative press, arguments have been made for the value of collective

organization and ‘anti-economics’. John Downing’s study of ‘self-managed

media’ provides many vivid case studies of alternative press titles that have

worked successfully in this manner (Downing, 1984). He contrasts these

with the organizational style of such papers as The Morning Star and

Socialist Worker , based on the Marxist media of the Soviet bloc: hierarchi-

cally organized with communication ﬂowing vertically, mostly downwards,

from writers to readers. In its place he prefers self-management of media

by activists themselves, where editorial and production decisions are made

collectively, and communication is horizontal (both within and between

publications). For Downing, the importance of collective organization and

horizontal communication does not reside solely in some notion of

ideological purity or anti-managerial theorizing. Downing does not simply

argue that we replace the monolithic Soviet model of socialist communica-

tion with another, he is also implicitly arguing that the alternative media

that adopt such organizational methods are performing a very different

function (in this he is in agreement with Traber).

To argue this position effectively, a study is required that examines the

alternative press in the light of the claims made for it by Downing and

Traber. Such a study must engage directly with the criticisms made by

Comedia. To do so entails locating the alternative press in a socio-political

context, in order to judge its effectiveness in that context. Comedia offer us

only an ‘alternative ghetto’, but there is another, powerful context available

in the notion of the alternative public sphere.

Once again, we turn to the work of John Downing, who posited the

notion of an alternative public sphere in his study of West German anti-

nuclear media (Downing, 1988) under the same condition as its dominant

relative, as ‘a culturally embedded social practice’ (Boyd-Barrett, 1995:

Atton, A reassessment of the alternative press

230). He identiﬁes in the German anti-nuclear movement an ‘alternative

public realm’ of debate, itself the ‘seedbed of many alternative media’.

Downing convincingly replaces Habermas’s twin historical foundations —

the coffee-houses and salons, and the small-scale bourgeois media — with

more contemporary manifestations: he presents ‘the alternative scene’ of

‘bookstores, bars, coffee-shops, restaurants, food-stores . . .’ that provide

the fora in which discussion and debate of the issues presented by the

periodicals of the anti-nuclear movement take place. Such an ‘oppositional

political culture’ Downing found to be ‘much better nourished in West

Germany than in Britain’. He held this to be so as a result not simply of

the amount of alternative information circulating, but because of that

crucial other, ‘the experience of exchange inside a ﬂourishing alternative

public realm’, in other words, strong horizontal channels of communica-

tion, with an emphasis on ‘activity, movement and exchange . . . an

autonomous sphere in which experiences, critiques and alternatives could

be freely developed’ (1988: 168). 2

The alternative press in its public sphere

The value of the concept of the alternative public sphere for the present

purpose is twofold. First, as Garnham has observed, the ‘demonstrable

crisis in the forms and practices of democracy in Western capitalist

politics’ has seen the public sphere ‘[take] over the central role previously

occupied by the question of dominant ideology or hegemony’ (Garnham,

1995: 376). The rise of the non-aligned social movements in the 1990s and

the attendant disaffection with parliamentary democracy evinced by young

people are examples of this crisis. 3 The 1990s have seen a rise in large-

scale, popular protest movements. These include many groups and move-

ments espousing direct action to further their causes. Such groups have

remained politically unaligned and thousands of people have chosen to

involve themselves actively in more self-organized, collective forms of

protest. Peter Dahlgren eloquently locates this phenomenon ‘[i]n the

intersection of the crisis of the national state, the sagging vitality of

parliamentary politics and the segmentation of audiences’ and notes how

we ﬁnd here ‘the dramatic ﬂowering of new political and social move-

ments’ (Dahlgren, 1991: 13). Many of these protests centre on the

environment. Of these, the most prominent actions have been large-scale,

well-publicized demonstrations against motorway extensions and bypasses

throughout Britain (such as those documented by McKay, 1996 and Welsh

and McLeish, 1996).

We should also note how the impetus for much campaigning on these

issues has come from a broad sweep (coalition is too formal a term for it)

of groups that are anarchist in nature, if not in political intent. Andy Chan,

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