alternative media

alternative media

chris attan

'SAGE Publications
London Thousand Oaks New Delhi
 © Chris Atton 2002
First published 2002
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 contents

Acknowledgements VIl1

Introduction 1

1 Approaching Alternative Media: Theory

and Methodology 7
Preliminaries 7
Defining 'alternative' and 'radical' 9
Downing's theory of radical media 19
Beyond the political: attitude versus position
in alternative and radical media 23
Towards a model of alternative and radical media 24
Alternative media as a field of production 29

2 The Economics of Production 32

The alternative press in its 'ghetto' 33
Finance 35
Reprographic technologies 38
Circulation 39
Distributive use in the alternative public sphere 42
Anti-copyright 42
Open distribution 44
Alternative fora as methods of distribution 45
The limits and freedom of 'alternative economics' 49
3 What Use is a Zine? Identity-building and Social
Signification in Zine Culture 54
A little history of fanzines 55
Zines and sociality 58
Cases: Bamboo Girl, Cometbus, Pilgrims
and MAXIMUMROCKNROLL 61
Zines and communication 67
Zine culture and e-zines 68
vi ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

Towards cases: The Etext Archives and

Labowitz's E-zine List 69
E-zine cases 71

4 Alternative Media and New Social Movements 80

The British new social movement
media in the 1990s 80
Approaches to organization and production 88
Do or Die 88
Squall 91
SchNEWS 93
Green Anarchist 95
Participation and control 98

5 Writers, Readers and Knowledge in New

Social Movement Media 103
Readers as writers 103
Knowledge production and knowledge producers 105
Conceptualizing alternative news as 'native reporting' 112
Radical populism and language 118
Activists as intellectuals 120
Examples of knowledge production 121
Coherence and coverage 126
Readers as readers 128

6 Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)

in Alternative Media 133
Anarchist perspectives on the Internet 134
Anarchists' use of the Internet 136
Assessing the constraints 138
Progressive librarians and McSpotlight 144
Hybridity and 'purity' 151

Conclusion 153

Bibliography 157

Index 167
 illustrations

Box 1. A typology of alternative and radical media 27

Figure 1. Darnton's communication circuit

(after Darnton, 1990) 26
 acknowledgemen ts

would like to thank my colleagues in alternative media studies, Jay

I Hamilton and Nick Couldry, who were generous enough to read and
comment on various draft chapters of this book. John Downing read
the entire first draft and offered much pertinent criticism: I am in his
debt. Their encouragement kept me going at dark moments. Natalie
Fenton, Simon Frith, Peter Golding and Tony Harcup provided much
welcome enthusiasm, support and criticism for this project. Sharif Gemie
and Jon Purkis at Anarchist Studies trusted me: had they not, much of this
work would be undone. Parts of the book began life as my PhD thesis: I
thank my supervisors David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery and Desmond
Bell for their support and criticism, also my examiners George McKay and
Ian Welsh. Numerous colleagues in the Popular Culture Association and
the Media Studies, Communication and Cultural Studies Association pro-
vided much opportunity for discussion of the main themes of this work.
I must also thank those editors, writers and readers who so generously
and patiently answered my questions. Lucy Green at Popular Music
cheered me up at an important moment. Thanks to Earache Records,
Cyclops Records and Champagne Lake Productions for sonic refresh-
ment in the final stages. Julia Hall, my editor at Sage, placed much faith
in me - I hope it is repaid here. As is customary, I end by thanking those
who had to endure this project out of hours: Kate, Daniel and Jacob. And
Godzilla.
An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as 'A Re-assessment of the
Alternative Press', Media, Culture and Society, 21(1), January 1999,
51-76. Parts of Chapter 6 appeared in earlier forms as parts of 'Are
There Alternative Media after CMC?', M/C Reviews, 12 April 2000.
< http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/altmedia.html > and
'Anarchy on the Internet: Obstacles and Opportunities for Alternative
Electronic Publishing', Anarchist Studies, 4(2), October 1996, 115-132.
The material on Green Anarchist in Chapters 4 and 5 first appeared as
part of 'Green Anarchist: A Case Study in Radical Media', Anarchist
Studies, 7(1), March 1999,25-49.
 introduction

n his fine book Why Study the Media? Roger Silverstone (1999: 103)

I affirms that alternative media 'have created new spaces for alternative
voices that provide the focus both for specific community interests as
well as for the contrary and the subversive'. It is all of these - the com-
munity, the contrary and the subversive - that are the subject of my book.
Silverstone talks of the employment of mass media techniques 'to pursue
a critical or alternative agenda, from the margins, as it were, or from the
underbelly of social life'. How this is done and what it means to people
who do it are similarly my concerns. To decide what alternative media are
and how they may be considered alternative are tasks not easily achieved
(indeed, a large part of this book wrestles with these fundamentals). In dis-
cussing my work with colleagues and friends I am most often asked two
questions. The first is: Do alternative media still exist? For these ques-
tioners alternative media mean the underground press of the 1960s (such
as Village Voice and The Rat in the US, Oz and IT in the UK). The ques-
tion fixes these media historically as counter-cultural emanations - it also
considers them as enterprises of the past. If their aims had not been
achieved, they had at least been abandoned when their editors, writers
and readers moved on to more mature activities (steady jobs, families,
mortgages). The simple answer is: Of course they do. Examples abound.
Far from disappearing in the early 1970s alternative media have bur-
geoned. The rise of the fanzine as an integral part of the punk subculture
of the late 1970s was instrumental in generating a second wave of
underground-like publications that dealt as much with the politics of
liberation, direct action and anarchism as they did with popular music.
This takes us to our second question: What are alternative media? For
whilst the underground press of the 1960s, the punk fanzines of the 1970s
and the direct-action papers of the 1990s offer examples that are more or
less culturally and politically congruent (despite their apparent differences -
at the time, the worst thing you could say about a punk fanzine was that
2 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

it took its influence from the hippie press) - it is unlikely that these
exhaust the list of candidates for inclusion as 'alternative media'.
Do we use 'alternative' as a catch-all for anything that isn't available
at our local newsagents? Is it a synonym for 'underground', 'radical',
'oppositional' - even 'samizdat'? We might look beyond paper formats
to video (such as the work of the Videofreex of the early 1970s or of the
video activists of the 1990s); television (the radical Deep Dish satellite
network in the US or the local community TV stations in the UK); radio
(pirates or local micro-broadcasters); and inevitably the hybrid forms of
communication and media that the Internet and the World Wide Web
have enabled. Nor need the 1960s be our historical reference point. The
radical wing of the English underground at that time took their cue from
the English radical newspapers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Some, such as Black Dwarf, took both their revolutionary
politics and their titles from such ancestors. Might we not even consider
the inflammatory pamphlets of Abiezer Coppe, writing during the
English Revolution, as alternative media? On both sides of the Atlantic,
working-class organizations and communities have been producing their
own media for at least the past two centuries. Now firmly separate, the
traditions of socialism and anarchism were at one time more closely con-
cerned with developing media of political value to both: such projects
flourished during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
(Quail, 1978). To these we can add the publications of new social
movements, the political and the sexual, environmentalism, the gay and
lesbian movement and feminism. Nor need we stop there. Any compre-
hensive audit of alternative media activity is almost impossible (which is
not to say that such attempts are not without value: Atton, 1996a and
Noyce, 1979 present useful guides to the literature, though both are
very much products of their time). Many titles circulate in small numbers
to specialist or elite groups; most never appear in newsagents or book-
shops. Many cease publishing after a handful of issues (if that). In
Edinburgh, Scotland, where I work and live, I wonder what happened
to Auld Reekie's New Tattoo? The Stockbridge and Newtown Rocket?
Scottish Anarchist? Perhaps they came to a close, their work done, their
ambition achieved. Perhaps the money dried up or no one would distri-
bute them. Perhaps no one cared enough.
This book does not attempt to be a comprehensive survey of alterna-
tive media, neither culturally, politically nor historically. This is not to
ignore history: indeed, much of my argument rests on, if not historical
continuity, at least on historical 'congruence' at one level or another. The
study is, I hope, grounded in the histories of alternative media from the
past two centuries. Rather than attempt a history that runs roughshod
 INTRODUCTION 3

over political and cultural contingencies and that flattens out economic
and social differences in its haste to construct a narrative of alternative
media avant la lettre, I ground my study historically at appropriate junc-
tures where contemporary study and historical record can illuminate
one another. I have no wish to rewrite (at least) 200 years of popular
struggle and radical democratic projects as though all they told us was the
story of 'alternative media'. My study then begins with the alternative
media of the 1990s, for two reasons. First, this is the period I know best;
my own research has to date concentrated on that decade. Second,
though most studies of alternative media could be far more detailed
for any period, the 1990s are especially poorly represented. This is unfor-
tunate, given the rise in independent and small-scale publishing the
decade has seen, particularly the explosion of fanzines and zines since the
1980s. The new social movements centred on environmentalism and
anarchism, and the attendant prominence of direct action and grassroots
organizing and protests have also proved fertile ground for alternative
media production. Whilst there is no shortage of writing on the move-
ments themselves, their media are largely untouched. Lastly there is the
use of electronic media, in particular the array of computer-mediated
communication strategies available across the Internet. Although there
is a vast range of media practices in current use I draw primarily on
examples from the UK and the US in printed and computer-mediated
media (despite what many pundits will have us believe, the printed page
is far from moribund - nowhere does it appear more vigorous than in its
alternative manifestations).1 I make no apology for the detail of many of
these examples: in a subject that is still developing and for which in some
circles a case still needs to be made, I think it important to provide case
studies that at times approach ethnography and at others offer close
textual and organizational readings. This relates especially to the studies
of new social movement media of Chapters 4 and 5 where my arguments
proceed from detailed analyses of organization, writing and knowledge
production. These arguments are then applied to a wider range of alter-
native media production, such as community media.
First I will work through some of the definitional problems that beset
the study of alternative media, going on to propose ways of examining
instances of a set of media practices which, whilst in need of a name, are
hardly explained at all simply by being called 'alternative media'. It is
with definitions that I begin in Chapter 1. Rather than attempt to define
alternative media solely by content I propose a theoretical and a methodo-
logical framework that incorporates content as one element in an alter-
native media culture that is equally interested in the processes and relations
that form around alternative media production. That is, I define alternative
4 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

media as much by their capacity to generate non-standard, often infractory,

methods of creation, production and distribution as I do by their content.
Of course, the two can hardly be separated at times. The radical deploy-
ment of collage in a punk fanzine is as much a process as a product.
Similarly the practice of anti-copyright encourages readers to make their
own copies of another's publication, as well as providing raw material for
new titles. I am also concerned here with Benjamin's (1934/1982) notion
of position and attitude in propaganda. Rather than merely reproducing
an argument as content in a publication Benjamin held that, for the pro-
paganda to be effective, the medium itself required transformation: the
position of the work in relation to the means of production had to be
critically realigned, not merely the argument on the page. This requires
not only the radicalizing of methods of production but a rethinking of
what it means to be a media producer. Alternative media, I argue, are
crucially about offering the means for democratic communication to
people who are normally excluded from media production. They are to
do with organizing media along lines that enable participation and reflex-
ivity. Raymond Williams (1980) highlighted three aspects of democratic
communication which we might consider as foci for this realignment:
decapitalization, deprofessionalization and deinstitutionalization. The
following chapters include detailed instances of how the framework
presented in Chapter 1 can be applied to the study of contemporary alter-
native media.
Chapter 2 examines decapitalization as a function of the economics of
production. It is particularly interested in the circulation and distribution
of the alternative press, both within its 'alternative public sphere' and in
its attempts to break out of its ghetto and reach a wider audience. At its
heart is an examination of the alternative press as an economic enter-
prise, albeit one which has sought to find alternatives to mainstream ways
of doing business, just as it has sought to find alternative organizational
methods. It also explores the reprographic technologies employed by the
alternative press since the 1960s and its circulation and its distribution,
in order to gauge how it is influenced by low finance. Finally it examines
forms of distribution peculiar to the alternative press, such as anti-
copyright and 'open distribution' which not only impact upon econom-
ics but also offer creative and productive models- for readers to become
media producers.
Chapter 3 develops this interest in economics to examine how the zine
(and the fanzine before it) provides cheap methods of promoting and sus-
taining identity and community. Here we also begin an examination of
deprofessionalization. The zine offers arguably the most vivid exemplar
of the do-it-yourself ethic of alternative media production. A zine may be
 INTRODUCTION 5

simply handwritten, photocopied cheaply and stapled by its editor,

requiring no professional skills at all. Further, what in mass media enter-
prises are discrete roles, in zine culture become collapsed into one: an
editor is often the sole writer, designer, paste-up artist, finisher and dis-
tributor. Despite this, zine culture has tended towards elitism. This
chapter goes to examine how the use of the Internet to produce zine-like
communication transforms this type of alternative media production and
opens it up to a far wider range of people.
When media are used by new social movements the simplicity of the
single-person publication is left behind and problems of organizing a
medium to encourage a large group of deinstitutionalized activists appear.
Chapter 4 focuses on these problems in organization, in particular those
of the collective. Within alternative media practices, this notion is mostly
concerned with collective approaches to policy-making and consensual
decision-making. This chapter examines how appropriate collective
models are for such organizations, and the opportunities and threats they
present. Is the collective merely a utopian model, whereas the everyday
activity is undertaken by a small elite? Many media privilege small-scale
'affinity groups' that work together with almost no hierarchical forma-
tion and an absence of bureaucracy. Those involved in the production of
the media might be as interested in their prefigurative political roles as
they are in what they are writing - once again, there is an interest in posi-
tion, not simply in attitude. Such media open themselves up to continual
democratization as more people see the potential for working from such
positions. Radically participatory methods of organization may well form
the seedbed for transforming readers into writers. This is the central topic
of Chapter 5. More broadly, this chapter also asks: Who contributes to
the alternative media? and identifies the extent to which 'experts' and
professional writers contribute to new social movement media. It intro-
duces the notion of 'native reporters' - activist-writers who write from a
position of marginalization in order to attract power to the social move-
ment to which they belong. Finally, this chapter addresses the production
and reception of knowledge in alternative media. What types of knowl-
edge are presented there and for whom? Who reads the media? For what
purpose? We must note that the opportunity for all readers to become
writers is no guarantor of a comprehensive set of discourses; even less
does it guarantee coherence.
My final chapter examines some of the ways in which computer-
mediated communication has been employed by new social movements
to create new media forms. Choices about which types of media to
employ are often as bound up with economic and ideological decisions as
they are with notions of 'penetration' and effectiveness (there is, for
6 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

instance, a significant 'Luddite' tendency amongst the anarchist media).

Where Chapter 3 showed Internet-based media opening up alternative
media forms to a wider range of participants, here I argue that Internet
technology has the capacity to erode the binarism of alternative and
mainstream media and the polarities of powerful and powerless, domi-
nance and resistance. Whilst I do not think that this argument upsets my
opening definitional and theoretical claims for the distinctiveness of
alternative media, it does attest to the difficulty of defining alternative
media and to the dangers of over-hasty categorization.
This book approaches the study of alternative media as a process.
Perhaps even more than the mass media, which are Roger Silverstone's
(1999: 78) concern, they 'are central to experience' because they are
'media that inform, reflect, express experience, our experience, on a
daily basis' - if not more than the mass media, then at least in a signifi-
cantly different manner, in that for those involved in their production,
the very creation of such media becomes part of daily life, of quotidian
experience. Silverstone argues that the political strength of the media
comes from the struggle over cultural forces such as access and participa-
tion, ownership and representation. I believe that the study of alternative
media - and of their organization, production and dissemination - opens
up politically liberating approaches to these 'media on the margins'.

Note

1. This emphasis means that I do not address alternative radio and television
in equivalent detail, though Chapters 5 and 6 do deal with alternative video and
television projects as part of wider discussions about community media, and infor-
mation and communication technologies. For a survey of global grassroots and
community television initiatives I recommend Tony Dowmunt's (1993) Channels
of Resistance. Deirdre Boyle (1997) offers a useful study of the pioneers of video
and TV activism in the US. For radio I especially admire Jankowski, Prehn and
Stappers's (1992) The People's Voice, and Amanda Hopkinson's and Jo Tacchi's
(2000) edited volume of the International Journal of Cultural Studies.
 ©m~ II ~1iI~®
1
approaching alternative
media: theory and
methodology

Preliminaries

n this chapter I propose a theory of alternative and radical media that

I is not limited to political and 'resistance' media but which may also
account for newer cultural forms such as zines and hybrid forms of
electronic communication. It draws principally on the theoretical
'sketches' of Downing (1984), Dickinson (1997) and Duncombe (1997)
and expands their work to propose a model that privileges the transfor-
matory potential of the media as reflexive instruments of communication
practices in social networks: there is a focus on process and relation.
Alternative and radical media hardly appear in the dominant theoreti-
cal traditions of media research. This is surprising, since some theoretical
accounts seem to have space for them. The classic Marxist analysis of the
media contains within it the seeds of such a space, in that alternative
media may be considered as offering radical, anti-capitalist relations of
production often coupled to projects of ideological disturbance and rup-
ture. The Gramscian notion of counter-hegemony is discernible through
a range of radical media projects (and not only in the obvious places
such as the working-class newspapers (Allen, 1985; Sparks, 1985) and
radical socialist publications (Downing, 1984)). Attempts to theorize and
develop conceptual frameworks for alternative and radical media alone
are even sparser. The Frankfurt School appear to have supported an alter-
native press through Adorno's assertion that the culture industry was best
8 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

combated by 'a policy of retreatism in relation to the media which, it was

argued, were so compromised that they could not be used by opposi-
tional social forces' (cited in Bennett, 1982: 46). Adorno found the
mimeograph 'the only fitting ... unobtrusive means of dissemination' to
be preferred over the bourgeois-tainted printing press (ibid.).
Enzensberger (1976) has proposed a politically emancipatory use of
media that is characterized by (1) interactivity between audiences and
creators, (2) collective production and (3) a concern with everyday life
and the ordinary needs of people. Denis MeQuail has configured this as
an extreme of the liberal-pluralist scale, but doubts whether the model is
able to withstand such a radical reconception:

we are now speaking of a version of relationships yet another step further

from the notion of dominant media, in which people using small-scale media
prevail and large media institutions and undifferentiated content can no
longer be found. (Me Quail, 1987: 88)

The range, number and diversity of alternative media in all their forms
(printed and electronic) and perspectives (single-person zines, large-scale
working-class newspapers, radical community newspapers, magazines of
sexual politics, anarchist samizdats) suggest the theory of liberal plural-
ism pushed to its limits. A model of the media where 'people using small-
scale media prevail' need not be the product of idealism or entail the
overthrow of large-scale media; we may find spaces in which small-scale
media already prevail (I shall explore these conceptually later). In a
revized edition of McQuail (1987) we find a 'democratic-participant'
model (again based on Enzensberger) that is founded on the use of
communications media 'for interaction and communication in small-scale
settings of community, interest group and subculture' that favour 'horizon-
tal patterns of interaction' where 'participation and interaction are key
concepts' (MeQuail, 1994: 132). This theory is only superficially limned:
nowhere (not even in Enzensberger) is it fully developed. From McQuail
(1987) we may also take a warning that perhaps it is more useful to find
theoretical purchase for alternative and radical media not in existing
accounts of dominant media, but in accounts of the media that oppose
such domination. Here I propose a theory of alternative and radical
media that proceeds from these accounts. The theory will not be limited
to political and 'resistance' media: the intention is to develop a model
that will also be applicable to artistic and literary media (video, music,
mail art, creative writing), as well as to the newer cultural forms such as
zines and hybrid forms of electronic communication (leTs). Even within
a single area of alternative media there is much heterogeneity (of styles,
of contributions, of perspectives).
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 9

We might consider this range of production as a Foucauldian

'insurrection of subjugated knowledges' (Foucault, 1980: 81). The range
of voices that is able to speak directly about these 'subjugated knowl-
edges' moves closer to a situation where 'the Other' is able to represent
itself, where analogues of Spivak's (1988) 'native informants' can speak
with their own 'irreducibly heterogeneous' voices. Alternative and radi-
cal media might then be considered a 'heteroglossic (multiple~voiced)
text' (Buckingham and Sefton-Green, cited in Gauntlett, 1996: 91, and
drawing on the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin) that gives full, hetero-
geneous voice to all those Others. The model presented here goes further
than the textual, however, finding heterogeneity, experimentation and
transformation in the principles of organization, production and social
relations within and across these media by considering the means of com-
munication as socially and materially produced (Williams, 1980). This
approaches Raymond Williams's earlier notion of democratic communi-
cation, the origins of which are 'genuinely multiple ... [where] all the
sources have access to the common channels ... [and where those
involved are able] to communicate, to achieve ... [a]ctive reception and
living response' (Williams, 1963: 304).
In his study of zines in the US, Duncombe (1997: 15) talks of his
attempts to 'discipline undisciplined subjects'. How well a single theoreti-
cal model may 'contain' such diversity will be one of its tests, along with
an examination of its explanatory power. I will draw principally on the
theoretical 'sketches' presented by three key studies: the politically radi-
cal media of the US and Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s (Downing,
1984), a study of British 'cultural alternatives' (Dickinson, 1997) and
Duncombe's (1997) study of American zines. I will also use aspects of
cultural theory (Bourdieu, 1984, 1993 and 1997).

Defining 'Alternative' and 'Radical'

The apparent looseness in defining terms in this field has led some critics
to argue that there can be no meaningful definition of the term 'alter-
native media' (Abel, 1997). Whilst 'radical' encourages a definition that
is primarily concerned with (often revolutionary) social change (and
'Radical' the same for a specific period of English history), 'alternative' is
of more general application. Custom and practice within alternative
media of the past decade appear to have settled on 'alternative' as the
preferred word. As a blanket term its strength lies in the fact that it can
10 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

encompass far more than radical, or 'social change publishing' can; it can
also include alternative lifestyle magazines, an extremely diverse range of
zine publishing and the small presses of poetry and fiction publishers. To
deploy 'alternative' as an analytical term, however, might afford us little
more specificity than saying 'non-mainstream'. Some commentators
appear to confuse the two terms.
I think it valuable to look in some detail at the competing definitions
of the alternative media. The most conspicuous arguments put forward
by both proponents and antagonists of the alternative media are inade-
quate, since neither offers a sophisticated understanding of the pheno-
mena. In their place I propose a model of the alternative media that is as
much concerned with how it is organized within its sociocultural context
as with its subject matter. I shall begin, though, with that subject matter.
There is no shortage of studies to show how the mass media charac-
terizes and represents specific social groups in ways suggesting that those
groups are blameworthy for particular economic or social conditions, or
that they hold extreme political or cultural views. Such groups rarely
comprise the powerful and influential elites that routinely have access
to such media. By contrast, other groups are marginalized and disem-
powered by their treatment in the mass media, treatment against which
they generally have no redress. The Glasgow University Media Group
(1976, 1982, 1985, for example) have shown how trade unions, striking
workers and the depiction of industrial relations are portrayed largely
from the position of the powerful: the politicians, the company owners
and their managers; workers and their representatives, on the other hand,
are portrayed at best as irritants, at worst as saboteurs operating outside
the bounds of logic and common sense. David Miller's (1994) study of
the mainland reporting of Northern Ireland, Todd Gitlin's (1980) exami-
nation of the American media's characterizing of the American New Left
in the 1960s and Marguerite J. Moritz's (1992) study of the American
media's representation of gays and lesbians all point to extremely selec-
tive and prejudiced news reporting. I am less interested here in exploring
the reasons for the social construction of mass media news (based on a
complex of newsroom routines and rituals, conditions of production,
notions of professionalism and objectivity, rehearsed standards of writing
and editing, as well as accident and opportunity); rather I wish to empha-
size the alternative press's responses to such construction as demonstrated
not simply by critiques of those media but by their own construction of
news, based on alternative values and frameworks of news-gathering and
access. In short, these values proceed from a wish to present other inter-
pretations of stories - and to present stories not normally considered as
news - which challenge the prevailing 'hierarchy of access' (Glasgow
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY II

University Media Group, 1976: 245) normally found in the media. An

elite of experts and pundits tends to have easier and more substantial
access to a platform for their ideas than do dissidents, protesters, minor-
ity groups and even 'ordinary people': 'powerful groups and individuals
have privileged and routine entry into the news itself and to the manner
and the means of its production' (Glasgow University Media Group,
1980: 114). The aim of that part of the alternative media interested in
news remains simple: to provide access to the media for these groups on
those groups' terms. This means developing media to encourage and nor-
malize such access, where working people, sexual minorities, trade
unions, protest groups - people of low status in terms of their relation-
ship to elite groups of owners, managers and senior professionals - could
make their own news, whether by appearing in it as significant actors or
by creating news relevant to their situation.
John Fiske (1992d) has pointed out differences between the main-
stream media and the alternative media in their selection of news and in
the way that selection is made, particularly how the alternative media
politicize the 'repression of events' (though Fiske is severely sceptical of
the relevance of the alternative press to the quotidian concerns of ordi-
nary people). This remains a continuing, defining characteristic of how
much alternative media view their approach to their content. The US
pressure group Project Censored produces an annual publication that
contains the US's 'top censored stories'. Of the 25 stories presented as
'the news that didn't make the news' in its 1999 volume, only four had
been covered by the American mainstream media. Since its founding in
1976, Project Censored has consistently proved the assumption that the
alternative media is the home to stories that, for whatever reasons (gov-
ernment advice, commercial pressure from advertisers or cross-media
ownership, an innate conservatism in news reporting, news priorities) do
not appear in the mainstream media. Whilst no such project exists in the
UK, it is possible to find similar examples here too. Lobster, the British
journal of parapolitics, was the first to break the story about Colin
Wallace and 'Operation Clockwork Orange', the MIS plot to destabilize
the Wilson Government. Well before The Sunday Times and Nature
locked horns over the topic, the occasional alternative investigative mag-
azine Open Eye published an annotated feature on Peter Duesberg and
the AIDS/HIV controversy, which also included notes on where to find
more on 'unconventional viewpoints' regarding AIDS. News on some
British topics is only to be found abroad: the US journal Covert Action
Quarterly has published an extensive feature on the targeting of
Republican teenagers in Northern Ireland by the British military. In a media
culture that appears less and less interested in in-depth investigative
12 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

reporting, alternative media provide information about and interpretations

of the world which we might not otherwise see and information about
the world that we simply will not find anywhere else. Alternative publi-
cations are at bottom more interested in the free flow of ideas than in
profit.
Two American studies demonstrate the significance of alternative
media for radical or unconventional content. Patricia Glass Schuman
(1982: 3) argues that 'the alternative press - in whatever format - is our
modern pamphleteer'. The alternative media employ methods of pro-
duction and distribution, allied to an activist philosophy of creating
'information for action' timeously and rapidly. As such, they can deal
with emerging issues. It is in the nature of such media to have these
emerging issues at their very heart, since it is in the nature of activism to
respond to social issues as they emerge. Schuman shows how rape as a
social issue was first constructed as a 'sex crime' by an alternative press
publication - a full year before the New York Times identified it as such,
and four years before a major book publisher tackled the subject. In the
second essay, Terri A. Kettering (1982) examines the issue of rape in more
detail, comparing its coverage in the US alternative media and in main-
stream publications, along with a similar study of the Iranian revolution
of 1970s. In both cases she presents compelling evidence to confirm her
thesis that 'in both timeliness and content, the alternative press can be
shown to be a more dependable information resource' (1982: 7). Subse-
quently my own work (for example Atton, 1996a: Ch. 3) has presented
further confirmation from a British perspective.
Such arguments bear out the second and third elements of a definition
of the alternative press proposed by the Royal Commission on the Press
(1977):
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] multi-

plicity of alternative publications [that] suggest satisfaction with an insuf-
ficiently diverse established media, and an unwillingness or inability on
the part of major publications to provide space for the opinions of small
minorities' (1977: 40). It also recognized the marginality of many of the
presses, their small print runs and virtual invisibility in the marketplace.
For the most part this assessment rings true. However, the first element
of the Commission's definition is contentious: the size of minority audi-
ences is debatable (the alternative media have published and continue to
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 13

publish for some large minorities: the gay and lesbian media are one
example). In the light of mass protest movements, it is arguable whether
such views as are propounded in the alternative media are not in fact
'widely-held'. Similarly, John Fiske's (1992a: 47) assertion that much of
the alternative media 'circulates among a fraction of the same educated
middle classes as does official news' is also contentious. In the light of
the accounts of contemporary alternative news production (for example,
Dickinson, 1997; Minority Press Group, 1980a; Whitaker, 1981), his
further assertion that this represents 'a struggle between more central and
more marginalised allegiances within the power-bloc, rather than
between the power-bloc and the people' is less credible. Indeed, this
would be flatly contradicted by those whose aim in setting up an alter-
native news publication was to regain power over their lives, since they
consider themselves emphatically not of the power bloc.
The editors of Alternatives in Print (the major current bibliographical
reference work in this field) present three apparently simple criteria
against which to test the publishers that appear in their pages. They hold
that a publisher can be thought of as alternative if it meets 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 responsi-
bility 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)

Such apparently simple criteria present problems. Whilst non-

commerciality is rare enough in mainstream publishing, no indication is
given as to how a concern for ideas might be demonstrat~d. Non-profit-
making publishers can easily include charities, some of whose aims might
well conflict with what our authors have in mind in their second crite-
rion. Although they do not provide examples of 'social responsibility' the
authors are writing from a perspective where we would expect three
issues to be prominent: the promotion of sustainable economics, of local
communities and of local democracy, all in the face of the increasing
globalization and concentration of commercial and political power into a
nexus of national government and corporate interests. Unfortunately, the
addition in this second criterion of 'creative expression, or usually a com-
bination of both' first of all widens the definition of alternative media to
include any type of artistic publication, then apparently narrows it to a
category that is, in my experience, rarely encountered in this field: the
14 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

combination of creative expression and social responsibility. In my survey

of British and American alternative presses, I was able to identify many
examples of these two categories as separate, but none that combined
them. Though the diversity of features that typify the zine might well
include both in one cover, this is not to say that there is any articulation
between them (Atton, 1996a). The third criterion, that it is 'enough for
publishers to define themselves as alternative publishers' hardly needs
comment. Since the rise of the zine in the 1980s, many mainstream pub-
lishers (mostly newspapers) have tried to capitalize on their attraction
to a young readership largely disaffected with the mainstream media
by issuing their own ersatz zines (as I shall show in Chapter 3). This last
criterion makes no allowance for such deceit.
Finally, these three criteria - and we must bear in mind that they are
meant to be separate criteria, for which a publication need only fulfil any
one to be considered 'alternative' - ultimately lead us nowhere more pre-
cise than does the more common negative definition best 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).
Such vagueness of nature and intent leaves proponents of the alter-
native media and the presses themselves open, on occasion, to fierce crit-
icism that questions their very existence. If they cannot even define what
they do, why should they be considered as the special cases they so clearly
see themselves to be? Richard Abel has argued that, 'what we are left
with is a term so elastic as to be devoid of virtually any signification'
(Abel, 1997: 79). He claims that the alternative media fail to offer any
convincing display of uniqueness in any of three areas: on the grounds of
content, on the championing of social change and on the grounds of eco-
nomic freedom. A constructive definition of alternative media can begin
with the presence of radical content, most often allied to the promotion
of social change. Some would argue that the availability of Noam
Chomsky's political writings at any branch of Waterstone's (when they
were once the mainstay of the small press and the anarchist journal)
proves that we simply do not need alternative media for the transmission
of radical ideas. However, there remains much opportunity for radical
content outside the mainstream: the British and American mass media are
supremely uninterested in the radical politics of anarchism (in all its hues).
Witness the demonization of the term 'anarchist' in mainstream media
coverage of the May Day 2000 protests in London or in the coverage of
the previous year's protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organ-
ization. The equation of anarchism with thuggery (at worst with terrorism)
is perennial (Atton, 1996b). By contrast the mass of anarchist journals,
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 15

magazines, newsletters and web sites offer accounts of working-class

resistance and struggles against global capitalism that, whilst highly per-
sonalized and explicitly biased, present stories from under the police
baton. The electronic archive Spunk Press (examined in more detail in
Chapter 6) offers a rare blend of populist rhetoric, activist information
and intellectual substance. We may choose not to subscribe to their views,
yet they are available in such 'alternative' publications in the absence of
case-making elsewhere. And is not the content of most football fanzines
radical to some degree? They are certainly oppositional in large part. At
their heart is a critique of corporatism as thoroughgoing as any we might
find in an anarchist magazine. An editorial in Not the View, the Celtic
supporters' fanzine, demonstrates this well enough: 'The problem with
having the club run by financial investors is that when they look at Celtic
they only see a bunch of assets which make money.... When we as fans
see Celtic, however, we see something unique and magical.' However
idealized the latter statement might be (and however contentious it might
be to, say, a Rangers supporter), to redress the former would require a
radical programme of social change. Not the View may not be setting out
a five-year plan, but it is certainly critiquing the causes of the malaise. It
is no surprise that the roots of many football fanzines have been seen to
lie in the punk fanzine and that such fanzines have exhibited a similar
oppositional stance. Some editors of punk fanzines have gone on to edit
football fanzines. This argument sees homologies between two groups of
fanzines based on their identity as sites of cultural contestation. Not the
View demonstrates how popular culture can be politicized to social
advantage. It is perhaps not too fanciful to see in the football fanzine a
way of creating the kind of counter-hegemonic power bloc of which
Stuart Hall has talked.
Tim O'Sullivan (1994: 10) introduces the notion of 'radical' social
change as a primary aim of 'alternative' media, in that they 'avowedly
reject or challenge established and institutionalised politics, in the sense
that they all advocate change in society, or at least a critical reassessment
of traditional values'. Elsewhere, in defining independent production
(which itself can be construed as a part of alternative media) he notes a
further two characteristics that set alternative media practice apart from
the mainstream:

1. a democratic/collectivist process of production; and

2. a commitment to innovation or experimentation in form and/or content.
(O'Sullivan et aI., 1994: 205)

For O'Sullivan, alternative media argue for social change, seek to involve
people (citizens, not elites) in their processes and are committed to
16 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

innovation in form and content. This set of aims takes into account not
only content, but presentation and organizational procedures. It defines
alternative media positively and usefully. With these considerations in
mind, we can consider Michael Traber's notion of alternative media
where:

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; emphasis 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 regarded only as observers
or marginal commentators on events (as in the 'vox pop' interview); they
achieve prominence only when they are the actors in a situation that is
bounded by values based on, for instance, conflict or the bizarre. He
divides alternative media into two sectors: advocacy media and grass-
roots media. 1 The alternative advocacy media adopt very different news
values from the mass media, introducing 'alternative social actors [such
as] the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised and indeed the ordinary
manual labourer, woman, youth and child as the main subjects of [their]
news and features' (Traber, 1985: 2).
It is the grassroots media, Traber argues, that offer the most thorough
version of alternative news values. They are produced by the same people
whose concerns they represent, from a position of engagement and direct
participation. This need not preclude the involvement of professionals,
but they will be firmly in the role of advisers, their presence intended to
enable 'ordinary people' to produce their own work, independent of pro-
fessional journalists and editors. Traber is arguing from his experience as
a journalist and journalism tutor in India, Zambia and Zimbabwe. His
primary concerns are with the production of news and information in
areas of these countries where the mass media (if it exists) does not pene-
trate, but also to provide a counter to the often state-run media or very
limited channels for the dissemination of news. This counter, Traber
argues, is best provided by local people, often working with a small
number of professional journalists. These are not there to set agendas or
even to insist on specific working practices; they are there to assist local
people in developing their own networks of news-gathering, offer support
and instil confidence in them as reporters, writers and editors. Traber is
arguing that when media production is placed in the hands of ordinary
people the types of news and the style in which it is presented will be
more relevant, more 'useful', and more appropriate to the communities in
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 17

which such news is produced and distributed. Traber presents a set of

alternative news values bound up not just with what is considered as
news, but also with approaches to news-gathering and with who writes
such news and how such news is presented.
This model can be seen as a form of community media. Similar con-
cerns were at the heart of the alternative community newspapers that
sprang up in the early 1970s throughout Britain. Community media have
at their heart the concepts of access and participation:

a conviction that the means of communication and expression should be

placed in the hands of those people who clearly need to exercise greater con-
trol over their immediate environment.... Once this happens, a process of
internal dialogue in the community can take place, providing opportunities
for developing alternative strategies. (Nigg and Wade, 1980: 7)

A leaflet distributed to publicize the launch of the Liverpool Free Press in

1971 proclaimed its difference from mainstream newspapers:

it's not part of a big newspaper chain and it's not trying to make money. The
Free Press believes that as long as newspapers are run by businessmen for
profit, there will be news that is not reported. The Free Press aims to report
this news. In addition, it tries to provide information which community
groups, factory workers, tenants and others will not only find interesting -
but useful. The Free Press does not represent the views of any political party
or organisation. The paper has no editor or owner - it is controlled by the
people who work for it (a group of unpaid volunteers). The Free Press really
is a different kind of newspaper. (Whitaker, 1981: 103)

This was certainly a different approach from that taken by the mass
media, but the Liverpool Free Press was also one in a long historical line of
newspapers that sought to be free from commercial considerations and to
provide 'ordinary people' with news and information that was directly use-
ful to them in their daily lives. The publicity material for the Liverpool Free
Press identified three prime elements that it shared with many alternative
media ventures: commercial independence (anti-commerciality, even) and
the journalistic freedom this was felt to bring; editorial independence from
political parties and other organizations; and the empowerment of specific
communities of interest (which in the case of the Liverpool Free Press and
many other similar papers is also a local community).
As an unnamed participant in a seminar led by Noam Chomsky put it:
'by alternative I'm referring to media that are or could be citizen-
controlled as opposed to state- or corporate-controlled' (quoted in Achbar,
1994: 197). By such control not only freedom from corporate influence
may be obtained, but also the freedom to publish on subjects directly use-
ful to citizens and to involve those same citizens in their production.
18 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

Whilst the content of such media is clearly important, my concern here

is to examine theories of alternative media that privilege the processes by
which people are empowered through their direct involvement in alter-
native media production. Stephen Duncombe has said that 'the culture of
consumption can neutralise all dissenting voices' by 'assimilating their
content' (1997: 127). In other words, it is not the simple content of a text
that is evidence of its radical nature; Duncombe is arguing what many
alternative publishers would also argue: that it is the position of the work
with respect to the relations of production that gives it its power and
enables it to avoid recuperation by the mere duplication of its ideas. This
is not to deny the significance of content, rather it is to present it within
a productive context that can be the radical equal of content in the
pursuit of social change. Here I follow Duncombe in his argument that
'the medium of zines is not just a message to be received, but a model of
participatory cultural production and organisation to be acted upon'
(Duncombe, 1997: 129).
In arguing for social change alternative media may then not only be
understood as producing instrumental discourses (theoretical, exposi-
tory, organizational) to provoke change: following Duncombe, they are
able to enact social change through their own means of production,
which are themselves positioned in relation to the dominant means of
production. Position and attitude both may argue for social change at a
number of levels. The change that is looked for need not be structural
on a national or supra-national level; it may be local, even individual:
for Duncombe even the personal act of becoming a zine editor is a social
transformation, regardless of how few copies of the zine are sold (or
even made). If the personal may be political, the personal may be of
social consequence.
At this stage it is useful to develop a set of characteristics that proceed
from the above definitions and place these, rather than definitional com-
petition, at the heart of a theoretical framework. Definitions, in any case,
have historical and cultural contingencies. ~lternative' in West Coast
counter-cultural terms invokes 'alternative therapies' and 'New Age'
thinking. 'Radical' for some can be as much to do with avant-garde artis-
tic activity as with politics. For zine writers, neither term may be prefer-
able: the even looser 'DIY publishing' might replace both. Does 'radical'
always entail 'opposition'? Downing talks of 'radical media' (1984), an
'alternative public realm' (1988), 'alternative media' (1995) and 'radical
alternative media' (2001), but he also refers to 'counter-information' and
'popular oppositional culture'. His discussion of Negt and Kluge's
(1972/1983) work raises Gramsci's notion of 'counter-hegemony' which,
Downing implies, is also a driving force behind the contemporary media
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 19

he is examining. We might consider the entire range of alternative and

radical media as representing challenges to hegemony, whether on an
explicitly political platform, or employing the kinds of indirect challenges
through experimentation and the transformation of existing roles, routines,
emblems and signs that Hebdige (1979) locates at the heart of counter-
hegemonic subcultural style. Jakubowicz (1991) finds in 'alternative' a
wider meaning: not simply sects or narrow special interests, but a wide-
ranging and influential sphere that may include all manner of reformist
groups and institutions. Yet its influence is significantly mitigated by state
censorship (since its publications are very visible) and its own policy (an
interest in long-term survival) prevents it from advocating widespread
social change. This last is reserved for an 'oppositional', revolutionary
public sphere.
From a sociological point of view, there is a discrepancy between what
'alternative' signifies and what 'oppositional' (and what we might con-
sider its cognates: 'counter-information' and 'counter-hegemony') signi-
fies. It is instructive here to refer to Raymond Williams's interpretation
of them:

Williams made a vital distinction between alternative and oppositional prac-

tices. Alternative culture seeks a place to coexist within the existing hege-
mony, whereas oppositional culture aims to replace it. For instance, there
is a world of difference between a minority 'back-to-nature' cult and the
ecology movement's global reach. (McGuigan, 1992: 25)

Culturally and politically, then, such media as defined by Downing as

'alternative' and by Jakubowicz as 'oppositional' are perhaps best consid-
ered as oppositional in intent, having social change at their heart. This
accords with Williams's hope that the culture of the new social move-
ments, although termed an 'alternative' culture, was 'at its best ... always
an oppositional culture' (Williams, 1983: 250). In his study of radical
media in the US and mainland Europe, Downing (1984) offers one of the
few detailed essays into a theory of the media of these oppositional
cultures.

Downing's Theory of Radical Media

Downing proposes a set of 'alternatives in principle' that draw on anarch-

ist philosophy, though they do not presuppose any explicit anarchist ten-
dency within any particular publication (indeed, none of Downing's case
20 A LT ERN A T I V E M E D I A

studies are of anarchist publications; most might be broadly characterized

as radical socialist). Instead, he presents these principles in contrast to
'transmission belt socialism', which, he argues, rather than liberating
media, constrains them by demanding unquestioning allegiance to the
Party, its intelligentsia and the institutions of the State. Revolutionary
socialist media, Downing holds, whatever their totalizing claims against
the monopolies of the capitalist mass media, are hardly exemplars of
media democracy in action: they are as hierarchical, limiting and bound
by authority as are the mass media of capitalism. Whilst interested pri-
marily in political media, he is not prescriptive about content: rather he
privileges process over product, organization and engagement over words
on the page and circulation figures. He argues:

1 the importance of encouraging contributions from as many interested

parties as possible, in order to emphasise the 'multiple realities' of social
life (oppression, political cultures, economic situations);
2 that radical media, while they may be partisan, should never become a
tool of a party or intelligentsia;
3 that radical media at their most creative and socially significant privilege
movements over institutions;
4 that within the organisation of radical media there appears an emphasis
on prefigurative politics. (Downing, 1984: 17)

Downing was writing before the radical transformation of the

Communist countries after 1989 and his arguments against the Party and
the State are less urgent today. Neither does Downing offer an historical
perspective that stretches back further than the 1960s: the anarchist
presses of the US and Europe and the varieties of radical (and Radical)
newspapers before them remain untouched, their 'alternatives in princi-
ple' unconsidered. Downing also ignores zine culture and the Party news-
paper. In his extensively revised edition of this work, Downing (2001)
ranges much more widely through history and culture, drawing richly
for example on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political cartoons
in Britain, German labour songs of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and nineteenth-century African American public festivals. There
is not space here to engage with all these manifestations of radical media
that take us well beyond the print and radio media which were Downing's
earlier concerns. It is worth, however, examining Downing's updated
theoretical perspectives as they proceed from and inform his historical
instances. Downing stresses features of his earlier model, particularly
the emphasis on multiple realities of oppression (once more he draws
on anarchist philosophy, an approach I also find valuable and to which
I return throughout this book); organizational models that suggest
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 21

prefigurative politics; and the privileging of movements over institutions.

This last informs his entire approach to the extent that he considers radi-
cal media as the media of social movements. As in his 1984 work, this
means that single-person or small-group ventures such as fanzines and
zines are ignored, as are what some (Downing, amongst them?) might
term 'weaker' forms of alternative media such as the personal web page.
His approach is reflected in his choice of terminology: he prefers 'radical
alternative media' which, he argues, is a more precise term than 'alter-
native media' ('alternative media is almost oxymoronic. Everything is, at
some point, alternative to something else': Downing, 2001: ix). For me
his designation signals an interest in considering media as radical to the
extent that they explicitly shape political consciousness through collec-
tive endeavour (after all, 'rebellious communication and social move-
ments' is the subtitle of his revised work). As we have seen, Downing is
now open to a far wider range of media than he was in his 1984
edition, yet his model remains limited by his emphasis on social move-
ments. His nuanced arguments draw on a richer, more subtly layered
account of radical media than his earlier work. He brings together con-
siderations of an alternative public sphere, counter-hegemony and resis-
tance, the place of the Gramscian organic intellectual in such media, the
role and nature of audiences - all of which I also examine here for the
same reason: to move away from the futile 'hunt for sole [social] agents'
(Downing, 2001: 98) and to place radical and alternative media as com-
plex 'agents of developmental power, not simply as counterinformation
institutions, and certainly not as a vapid cluster of passing gnats'
(2001: 45). Downing acknowledges that his earlier binarism (between
radical and mainstream media) and 'antibinarism' (seeing in radical
media a way forward beyond the then dominant opposition between
Western capitalist media and the Soviet model) prevented him from see-
ing more finely gradated positions, such as the possibility of democratiz-
ing mass media or the occasional, radical deployment of mass media. Yet
his striving for a more 'impure', hybridized version of radical media is left
unfulfilled by his focus on social movements. Hybridity and purity as
problematics of alternative media are certainly accessible through an
examination of new social movement media, but they can also be
approached through media that accommodate themselves rather more
cosily with mass media and mass consumption (as in my examination
of Jody LaFerriere's personal web site, The Big DumpTruck!, in Chapter 3),
where a celebration of the banal and the mundane replace political
consciouness-raising. The limits of Downing's approach also extend to
his coverage of artistic production as an instance of radical alternative
media: he considers street theatre and performance art only as media
22 A LT ERN A T IV E M ED I A

practices of social movements. This leaves no space for the performance

art of, say, the Vienna actionists (Green, 1999), or the 'demotic avant-
garde' that characterizes the work of British artist Stewart Home (as pre-
sented for example in Home, 1995). (Though Downing does make an
important point when he reminds us that by considering art, media and
communication together we 'do not fall into the trap of segregating infor-
mation, reasoning and cognition from feeling, imagination, and fantasy'
2001: 52.)
There are resonances with Downing's principles of 'rebellious commu-
nication' in the Radical reformist papers that flourished in England from
the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Amongst these we find
a redrawing of technical and professional roles and responsibilities, and
social and cultural transformations, such as: (1) clandestine, underground
distribution networks; (2) 'pauper management'; (3) journalists seeing
the'mselves 'as activists rather than as professionais'; (4) an interest in
'expos[ing] the dynamics of power and inequality rather than report[ing]
"hard news'" (Curran and Seaton, 1997: 15); (5) developing a close
relationship with readers - to the extent where many papers were sup-
plied with reports written by readers (such as those by 'wotker corres-
pondents' - Workers' Life, 1928/1983 and 'reader-writers' - Atton,
1999a); (6) close links with radical organizations, highlighting the value
of 'combination' and organized action; and (7) the key role of radical
media in a working-class public sphere (Eley, 1992). At this time 'the mili-
tant press sustained a radical sub-culture' (Curran and Seaton, 1997: 20).
Similar parallels may be found in the anarchist presses of the turn of the
century (Hopkin, 1978; Quail, 1978) and of the 1990s (Atton, 1999a),
where they also resonate with a larger, non-aligned network of social
movement publications centred on radical environmentalism (Carey,
1998; Searle, 1997). This is not to ignore the historical and cultural con-
tingencies of these practices, nor to homogenize their political content or
their aims. Alternative media - like any forms of cultural production -
and their creators are positioned, 'enunciated': 'we all write and speak
from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is
specific' (Hall, 1990: 222). Social relations, forms of technology and
styles of discourse (for example) and their combination are likely to be
'available' for transformation within alternative media at particular
places and times. Whilst the bracketing-off of processes (and even con-
tent) might afford us conceptual clarity, the better to look closely at what
we mean by 'alternative media', we must not forget to recouple them
with history and culture when dealing empirically.
Downing's principles also have relevance to the products of 'zine
culture' (Duncombe, 1997). This invites further theoretical consideration
 THE 0 RY AND MET HOD 0 LOG Y 23

regarding the radicality of process over content, a consideration which

encourages us to account for alternative and radical media with content
that is not explicitly political or that has an avowedly non-political con-
tent, where the processes of production enable the 'position' of the media
and its producers to be radicalized.

Beyond the Political: attitude versus

position in alternative and radical media

The separation of attitude and position has been explored by Stephen

Duncombe in his work on American zines. For him, it is not the simple
content of a text that is evidence of the radical nature of a zine. The con-
tent of many zines is hardly politically or socially transforming in itself.
Their value proceeds not simply from their content - that is, not from
the work's 'attitude toward the oppressive relations of production that
mark our society, but [from] the work's position within these relations'
(Duncombe, 1996: 315). This draws on Walter Benjamin's idea of 'the
author as producer' (Benjamin,1934/1982) which Duncombe goes on to
apply to the production of zines. He finds three characteristics that dis-
tinguish the production of zines from that of mainstream magazines and
that exemplify their position within 'the oppressive relations of production'
rather than simply their attitude towards them. First, zine producers are
amateurs; second, their product is cheaply produced and promoted by
multiple-copying at no profit; third, the distinction between producer
and consumer is increasingly blurred.
In his original text, however, Benjamin's analysis goes further than
Duncombe takes it. Benjamin argues that an author's works must have
'an organizing function, and in no way must their organizational useful-
ness be confined to their value as propaganda' (Benjamin, 1934/1982:
216). The development of the zine has encouraged many readers to pro-
duce their own publications. Zines developed as vehicles of personal
expres~,ion; a network of zines arose where horizontal communication
between editors and readers became perhaps as important as the produc-
tion of the zine itself. The very format of the zine - with design and
production values that owed more to the copy shop than the printing
press - encouraged readers to become editors themselves. As Duncombe
notes, 'emulation - turning your readers into writers - is elemental to the
zine world' (1996: 123). He draws on Benjamin for support: culture 'is
better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers - that is, readers
24 A LT ERN A T IV E M ED IA

or spectators into collaborators' (quoted in Duncombe, 1997: 127).

Once again, we can find resonances beyond the immediate genre. An
extreme example of ~his may be found not in the zines of the 1980s
(which are Duncombe's focus) but from the counter-culture of the 1960s:
an issue of the New York underground paper Other Scenes once offered
an entirely blank set of pages for readers as a do-it-yourself publishing
project (Lewis, 1972).
Zine culture indicates how radicality can be further located within pro-
duction values and cultural values. Hebdige extended Kristeva's under-
standing of 'radical' to account for the punk fanzine's interest in 'the
destruction of existing codes and the formulation of new ones' (see
Hebdige, 1979: 119). Here is an artefact expressive of a subculture (some
argue it is constitutive of a subculture: 'Zines are punk,' declared an
anonymous editor of Hippycore - Rutherford, 1992: 3). The punk
fanzine stands for much more than an aesthetic preference; the radical
bricolage that characterizes the visual language of punk fanzines (Triggs,
1995), its graphics and typography can be seen as 'homologous with
punk's subterranean and anarchic style' (Hebdige, 1979: 112). Its use of
the photocopier as a liberating agent for the tyro editor became central
to the 'copy culture' that grew out of punk over the next two decades
(New Observations, 1994).

Towards a Model of Alternative

and Radical Media

Any model must consider not simply the differences in content and
medium/carrier (and its dissemination and delivery) but how communi-
cation as a social (rather than simply an informational) process is con-
strued. The question: What is radical about radical media? then becomes
two questions: What is radical about the ways in which the vehicle (the
medium) is transformed? and: What is radical about the communication
processes (as instances of social relations) employed by that media?
Dahlgren (1997) has observed that the focus of media research continues
to move away from the 'classic steps of the communication chain', that
is: (1) the sender and the circumstances of production; (2) the form and
content of the message; (3) the processes and impact of reception and
consumption. This is in significant part due to the 'awkward fit' of such
steps with questions surrounding the production of meaning by media
audiences. A model of alternative and radical media must account not
 THE 0 RY AND MET HOD 0 LOG Y 25

only for active audiences in the Fiskean sense of creating 'oppositional

readings' of mainstream media products (Fiske, 1992a) but also for
'mobilized audiences' - as well as notions of horizontal linkage, reader-
writers and extremely democratic organizational structures. Here the fit
with dominant communication models becomes even more awkward.
A communications perspective on alternative media is useful as long as
we are able to keep in mind that its value will, as Dahlgren argues, be best
realized by cultural interrogation. As a set of communication processes
within (sub)cultural formations, alternative media privilege the involved
audience over the merely informed (Lievrouw, 1994); that audience par-
takes of the media from a social point of view, not merely as a 'public'.
What we are calling 'alternative media' can be thought of as being organ-
ized along similar lines to Benjamin's desideratum. They typically go
beyond simply providing a platform for radical or alternative points of
view: they emphasize the organization of media to enable wider social
participation in their creation, production and dissemination than is pos-
sible in the mass media. Raymond Williams (1980: 54) highlighted three
aspects of communication as foci for this realignment: 'skills, capitaliza-
tion and controls'. In an explicit echo of Williams, James Hamilton
(2001a) has argued that to distinguish alternative media from the mass
media the former must be deprofessionalized, decapitalized and deinsti-
tutionalized. In short, they must be available to ordinary people without
the necessity of professional training, without excessive capital outlay
and they must take place in settings other than media institutions or simi-
lar systems.
The model I propose here deals with similar concerns: social relations
stand to be transformed through radical communications processes at the
same time as the media (the vehicles) themselves stand to be transformed
(visually, aurally, distributively). In this model, roles and responsibilities
are no longer discrete; there is much overlap and transformation of
notions such as professionalism, competence and expertise. No existing
communication model offers an easy fit with such transformations.
Robert Darnton's (1990) reconfiguration of the communication chain as
a circuit gets closer than does the classical communication chain to the
features and relations that might illuminate the social processes at work
in radical media production and reception. His model at least acknowl-
edges technical and professional roles such as those of publishers, print-
ers and distributors.
Perhaps Darnton's circuit is over-utilitarian: its focus is on roles
and responsibilities rather than on processes, with cultural and social
determinants given the status of mere influences. His model emphasizes
the dominant and discrete roles of, for example, writers, publishers,
 "" ""
/ "" " ",
/

Economic, Legal
Political and
Social Contexts

,, /
I

""
" ""

--- ---

Figure 1 Darnton's communication circuit (after Darnton, 1990)

 TH EO RY AN D M ETH 0 DO LOGY 27

distributors and readers. In radical and alternative media these roles are
often confused and conflated, at times to an extreme degree: in the case
of a zine, the writer and publisher is typically the same person, as well as
being its designer, printer and distributor. In the case of a collectively
organized paper, all such duties might be undertaken at different times by
every member of the collective. Darnton's roles provide a poor fit with
the transformed roles and social relations (often experimental and shift-
ing) that radical media invoke and promote (perhaps most remarkably in
the reappearance throughout history of the notion of the reader-writer).

Box 1 A typology of alternative and radical media

1. Content (politically radical, socially/culturally radical); news
values
2. Form - graphics, visual language; varieties of presentation and
binding; aesthetics
3. Reprographic innovations/adaptations - use of mimeographs,
IBM typesetting, offset litho, photocopiers
4. 'Distributive use' (Atton, 1999b) - alternative sites for distribu-
tion, clandestine/invisible distribution networks, anti-copyright
5. Transformed social relations, roles and responsibilities - reader-
writers, collective organization, de-professionalization of
e.g., journalism, printing, publishing
6. Transformed communication processes - horizontal linkages,
networks

Box 1 presents a typology that draws on the preceding analysis of exist-

ing definitions and theory. In it, elements 1-3 indicate products and 4-6
processes. It is these six elements that form the basis of the model pre-
sented here. The broad division into products and processes does imply
independence, however. The social processes will activate and inform the
development of the products to the extent that each position in a com-
munications circuit such as Darnton's will be amenable to radicalization
in terms of products and processes, resources and relations. Using the
model it becomes possible to consider each point on such a circuit as a
dimension of communication, of social process ('writing', 'printing', dis-
tributing', etc.). 'Positions' becomes too fixed a term for them, since there
may be overlap; for example, between the roles of writer, editor, pub-
lisher and distributor of a zine. As dimensions, roles and responsibilities
can comprise a constellation of activities and relationships. An alternative
publication might then be interrogated as to its radicality in terms of its
28 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

multi-dimensional character, a perspective that privileges the overlap and

intersection of dimensions. Here are two examples.
First, a radical approach to distribution can entail making use of skills
and sites belonging to groups and communities normally excluded from
mainstream modes of distribution in an alternative public sphere (Downing,
1988), as well as making use of transformed notions of intellectual pro-
perty (such as 'anti-copyright': Atton, 1999b). These in turn suggest forms
of reprography that facilitate further production by 'readers' (such as the
Open Pamphlet series from the US, printed so as to open out tb A4 to
facilitate photocopying) who themselves become hybrid printers, finish-
ers and distributors.
Second, the position of a solitary agent who is writer, editor and
printer should be explained not simply as the outcome of a dilettante
interest in trying out new jobs or as a result of lack of resources (though
it may be these as well), but from a perspective that transforms these posi-
tions in relation to established notions and standards of professionalism,
competence and 'possibility'. At the same time the roles have the power
to transform one another by their coming together (whether by mutual
abrasion or a more 'liquid' interpenetration). Each dimension need not
be limited to activities and relationships; it can also include the products
of activities and technological transformations that lead to those products
(aesthetics, reprographic technologies, innovations in distribution).
Dimensions that intersect can generate counter-hegemonic strategies of
ownership (ownership of capital and intellectual property), power rela-
tions within the media and its audience. Here we locate Downing's
notions of lateral linkages and the empowerment of active audiences
through those linkages (Downing, 1984, 2001) and those relations which
engage with prevalent forces, especially regarding the status of creators
and producers in comparison with equivalent roles in prevalent culture
(the dominant public sphere versus the alternative public sphere).
Is it possible to make any comparative assessment of radicality across
various instances of alternative and radical media? How do we construe
a publication that tends to radicality in differing degrees in differing
dimensions? What is our scale for measuring those degrees? For instance,
a publication may be radical in its organization, but conservative in
respect of those who write for it - one that employs only professional
journalists yet in a collective decision-making organization. Within each
dimension there is complexity: within a reprographic ('printing') dimen-
sion a radical use of reprographic technology (the photocopier by zine
producers, for instance) may be present along with a new social relation
(an amateur writer working also as a printer): this presents a transformed
power relation in contrast to the prevailing professional culture of printing.
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 29

We need also to be alert to historical or geographical contingency: the

absence of radicality in any dimension may not limit a medium's revolu-
tionary potential: the dimension may hot be 'available' for radicalization
at that time or place, or in that culture. The authorship need not be
concerned solely with political radicality, but equally or instead with cul-
tural content. This encourages us to approach these media from the per-
spective of 'mixed radicalism', once again paying attention to hybridity
rather than expecting consistent adherence to a 'pure', fixed set of crite-
ria: '[i]f ... radical alternative media have one thing in common, it is that
they break somebody's rules, although rarely all of them in every respect'
(Downing, 2001: xi). Despite these difficulties, I hope that my model
avoids homogenizing alternative and radical media as the media of radi-
cal politics, of publications with minority audiences, of amateur writing
and production. It suggests an area of cultural production that - whilst it
lacks the explanatory power of a totalizing concept - enables us to con-
sider its various manifestations and activations as part of an autonomous
field (in the Bourdieusian sense) that is constituted by its own rules.

Alternative Media as a Field

of Production

How appropriate is it to consider alternative and radical media as a field?

Bourdieu's (1993) field of cultural production does recognize a space for
avant-garde artistic activities, which may comprise some aspects of alter-
native and radical media practice (independent record labels, mail art,
artists' books). Fiske has suggested that the systems of production and of
distribution within fan culture comprise a 'shadow cultural economy'
(Fiske, 1992b: 33). For all that it may admit, the cultural field is perhaps
too limited: it is after all concerned with literary and artistic values of pro-
duction. This is despite the ability of Bourdieu's field of cultural produc-
tion to encompass 'extremes' of creative activity. For Bourdieu, though,
these take place within the sector of the field concerned with restricted
production, to be distinguished from an opposing sector of large-scale
production. One purpose in positing an entire 'oppositional field' - rather
than attempting to accommodate contestation within any existing formu-
lation - is that Bourdieu's field seems inhospitable to certain notions of
radicality. Within alternative media production are numerous avant-gardes
that confound the dichotomy of restricted/large-scale sectors. Mail art
(Held, 1991) might be thought of as a democratized version of restricted
30 A LT ERN AT IV E M ED IA

artistic production, where elite art practices (such as the limited edition
and invitations to group exhibitions) are opened up to as many as wish to
contribute (Global Mail is a zine devoted to calls to such 'open' exhibi-
tions). In this arena at least, the value of the limited edition work of art is
seriously eroded by its being opened up to producers/agents that are typi-
cally drawn from the public for large-scale cultural production. Restricted
field practices are radically repositioned by being transformed under
demotic conditions more usually associated with large-scale production
strategies and techniques. We might also consider even the radicalization
of plagiarism in such a 'demotic restricted field'. Bourdieu (1993: 128)
sees plagiarism in large-scale production as an indicator of 'indifference or
conservatism': in the hands of an avowedly working-class autodidact such
as Stewart Home (a further example of the composite artist-author-editor-
publisher) plagiarism is radicalized as a demotic avant-garde (for example
Home, 1995). A demotic avant-garde appropriates and repositions capital
and authority directly from high culture, radically re-Iegitimizing an artis-
tic practice from that legitimate culture.
More recently, Bourdieu (1997) has proposed a journalistic field. It is
difficult to see how alternative and radical media could fit into this for-
mulation: as Marliere (1998: 223) has shown, the field itself is too undif-
ferentiated, too monolithic 'to provide a realistic account of a plural and
heterogeneous reality' of dominant journalistic practices, let alone alterna-
tives to them. There may be some value in considering it as a field in its own
right, as an oppositional counterpart to Bourdieu's dominant journalistic
field. Again, though, the multi-dimensionality of the model suggests a
conceptual space wider than journalism tout court - are zines journalism?
What is the relationship of anarchist web sites and Internet discussion lists
to journalism? The range of media products and activities available to the
present model encourages a hybridized field that comprises cultural (artis-
tic, literary) practices and journalistic practices and that admits of extremes
of transformation in products, processes and relations between the two. In
this chapter I have proposed definitional and theoretical models that privi-
lege the transformatory potential of the media as reflexive instruments of
communication practices in social networks: there is a focus on process and
relation. The model does at least encourage interrogation across the range
of production in this field, the better to place its constellations of products,
activities, institutions, movements, moments and cultures in structured,
explanatory settings. In what follows I shall examine in more detail those
transformations, particularly those in the processes and relations that create
the popular practices of what I am calling 'alternative media'. I shall begin
by addressing alternative media approaches to the economics of production
and the cultural products and formations that have arisen to realize them.
 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 31

Note

1. Traber's terminology reflects his background in development and alternative

journalism in the South; 'advocacy' and 'grassroots' are terms little used in British
media studies, for instance. This twin role of the alternative press has also been
noted by Elizabeth Fox (1997) in her survey of media and culture in Latin
America, where she highlights the organizational and educational value of such
media. The term 'grassroots' is more commonly used to define such media as are
described in Tomaselli and Louw's (1991) studies of the alternative media in
South Mrica. These terms are used in the present study simply to clarify two
trends in alternative media, the better to analyse one; there is no intention to
imply sociopolitical similarities between the conditions of production in the
South and those in Britain.
 ©m~n~I~®
2
the economics of
production

his chapter focuses on the circulation and distribution of alternative

T media within its alternative public sphere. At its heart is an exami-

nation of the alternative press as an economic enterprise which has
sought to find alternatives to mainstream ways of doing business. It will
explore the reprographic technologies employed by the alternative press
in order to gauge how they are influenced by low finance. Finally, it will
examine the economics of production in relation to an alternative public
sphere, in particular exploring the articulation of economic factors with
prefigurative methods of political organization. I shall look at the domi-
nant trends in the economic history of alternative publishing since the
1960s and apply this examination to a comparison of two key print titles
in the British alternative media of the 1990s, The Big Issue and the lesser-
known Squall. The Big Issue was founded in 1991 and has four separate
fortnightly editions in London, Scotland, Wales and the North of
England. Its aim, as is well known, is to 'help the homeless help them-
selves', by selling them copies of the paper that they then sell on the street
(making 45 pence per copy sold). Its unusual (though not unique) distri-
bution technique and the undoubted impact it has had on both its ven-
dors and the public should not, however, distract us from the differences
between it and the alternative grassroots press. As a member of the advo-
cacy press, The Big Issue speaks on behalf of the homeless and undoubt-
edly provides a lifeline to many. But it is emphatically not the direct voice
of the homeless. Only two pages in a 48-page issue are typically given
over to contributions by the homeless ('Street lights', a forum that is
mostly taken up with poetry, and offers no space for articles); the rest of
the paper is written mostly by young journalists. Nevertheless, we should
 THE ECONOMICS OF PRODUCTION 33

not ignore its presence on Britain's streets, not least because it offers
comparison in all the areas of this study. (All the British editions of The
Big Issue are at least more interested in the homeless than is the Los
Angeles edition which, according to Chris Dodge (1999: 61), 'doesn't
even pretend to be a voice for homeless people'.) Moreover, its aims are
generally similar to those of some grassroots titles, most obviously Squall,
which was launched in the year after The Big Issue to provide informa-
tion for the homeless, for squatters and travellers. Squall is more con-
vincingly the voice of the homeless, since it is largely written by activists,
many of whom are active in the squatting movement and have experi-
ences of being homeless themselves. It has also featured lengthy articles
by homeless people. It is edited entirely by activists, not by professional
journalists. From 1992 until 1997 it appeared quarterly in tabloid format
after which it ceased publication in print. It has since moved to on-line
publication. This chapter deals with its print history. (The economics of
on-line publishing and the transformation of notions such as circulation
and distribution are examined in Chapter 6.)

The Alternative Press in its 'Ghetto'

In the previous chapter I highlighted Michael Traber's argument that a

grassroots alternative press offered the truest, most thorough version of
alternative media values. Against it he set the advocacy press, one that
tended to commerciality and 'distance' from the subjects of its news. This
view has not been accepted uncritically by some commentators on alter-
native media. The most forthright critique has been the Comedia's (1984)
pessimistic assessment which, though over fifteen years old, has not been
significantly added to (nor argued against) in the ensuing decade. The fail-
ure of grassroots media, the group argued, was caused by the inability or
unwillingness of the alternative press to adopt methods of financial plan-
ning and organizational efficiency that would enable it to survive in the
marketplace. Comedia's solution for this 'underdeveloped' section of
alternative press was 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 in 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
regarding the extent to which such attitudes inevitably lead to 'failure'. 1
34 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

The alternative press still espouses such anti-commercial methods

today, as a deliberate demonstration by such publications of their practi-
cal commitment to their political strategy, one that is against capitalism
and managerialism. According to Comedia, this choice dooms the alter-
native press to 'an existence so marginal as to be irrelevant': it will never
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 by adopt-
ing values more reminiscent of Traber's advocacy press (Comedia cited
New Internationalist and New Socialist in this regard).
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: 198) 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. (The
Leveller's problems are examined in detail by Landry et aI., 1985.)
Summarizing 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' (p. 198). Similar conclusions
were reached by the Comedia group's predecessor, the Minority Press
Group, in their series of reports (especially Minority Press Group, 1980a,
1980b; 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 addi-
tion, 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, has remained low.
Comedia offer us only an 'alternative ghetto', but there is another,
powerful context available in the notion of the alternative public sphere.
John Downing posited this concept in his study of West German anti-
nuclear media (Downing, 1988) as 'a culturally embedded social practice'
(Boyd-Barrett, 1995: 230). He identifies in the German anti-nuclear
 THE ECONOMICS OF PRODUCTION 35

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',
not simply because 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 communication, with an emphasis on 'activity, movement
and exchange ... an autonomous sphere in which experiences, critiques
and alternatives could be freely developed' (1988: 168}.2 An alternative
public sphere would seem an appropriate theoretical foundation for
such phenomena in its formulation of a nexus of institutions that work
together without parliamentary influence, to enable the public to
address and debate political and social issues independently of the state.
This nexus of institutions inevitably includes the media; the alternative
public sphere treats its media and the constituencies they serve and
inform (and are in turn informed by) as inseparable. It is thus an appro-
priate model for contextualizing a theory of the alternative press, given
the vital relationship between the alternative press and the grassroots
movements that it supports and reports. Indeed, the emergence of many
alternative media is inseparable from their social and political actualiza-
tion (as movements).

Finance

Comedia's critique of the economic and organizational weaknesses of the

alternative press proceeds from the sector's failure to take seriously the
necessity of financial planning (Comedia, 1984). It notes that the bulk of
the alternative press of the 1960s and 1970s was heavily subsidized, and
that survival was only possible as long as such subsidies continued. There
were two major forms of subsidy: the music business and 'self-exploited
labour'. Whilst the former, in the shape of benefit concerts from the rock
groups of the time, was largely limited to the underground press titles
of Oz and IT, the latter is a recurring feature of these as well as of the
36 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

working-class press of the Morning Star and The Newsline. People work
for the paper for little or no wages as volunteers, a phenomenon encour-
aged by, as Comedia has it, 'their commitment to squatting and claiming
as a way of life' (1984: 97).
These primary subsidies were clearly still at work in the grassroots
press of the 1990s. Squall continued to get part of its funding from ben-
efit concerts. It was run by volunteers, and Comedia's note on 'squatting
and claiming' still holds good: Squall promoted squatting as a way of life.
Given that capital investment is minimal, and that the producers of these
titles are already working for no wages, there is not only little margin for
expansion, there is hardly space in which to survive. The subscription is
a common method of obtaining capital funding. The ratio of subscrip-
tions to other sales of Squall during its life as a print publication was
roughly 1: 9 (800 of a circulation of 7,000). Despite its low level, the sub-
scription at least offered a little financial security, providing the opportu-
nity for forward planning, however limited. Squall also regularly
appealed for donations (and still does in its electronic form). In the
absence of such funds, a publication can only rely on sales and advertis-
ing. Yet even these common commercial strategies are problematized by
the economic situation of the alternative press. Against such problems we
should compare the financial buoyancy of The Big Issue, made possible by
a subsidy for its first two years. This was provided by businesses, most
conspicuously by the Body Shop, whose Gordon Roddick provided
£500,000 to launch the paper. No such subsidy would be forthcoming
for a title such as Squall. Funding - when it does not come from readers
or explicit supporters of the alternative press - is looked upon with some
suspicion. The editors of Squall summarized their attitude as 'cautious ...
we do not [want to] become a marketing bucket' (from an interview con-
ducted by the author). Nowhere is this a more vexed issue than in atti-
tudes to advertising. We must note, however, that, from a combination of
fund-raising activities, sales and advertising Squall was able to meet 'the
in excess of £16,000 sum [sic] it takes to run and produce Squall for a
year' ('The State We're In: a Notice to Readers', Squall, 14, Autumn
1996: 12). Not that this was without difficulty: '[w]e've had, and still do
have, a lot of financial trouble holding the project together' (personal
correspondence with Squall, June 1998). Compared to The Big Issue
(which takes a wide range of advertising but, it appears, none for expen-
sive consumer products, nor for cigarettes and alcohol), advertising in
Squall was scarce. It never ran more than a handful of advertisements in
each issue. These were invariably small in size (never more than a sixteenth
of a page) and tended to advertise books, pamphlets and periodicals pro-
duced by other alternative presses; Squall reassured its readers that it
 THE ECONOMICS OF PRODUCTION 37

would not carry advertising 'for multinationals or cultural hijackers'

('The State We're In', p. 12).
Such a policy has its roots in both the mainstream analyses of press
freedom and more radical commentaries upon it. Curran and Seaton
argue that increased dependence on advertising has given the advertis-
ers themselves 'a de facto licensing authority' since, without their sup-
port, many newspapers would cease to be economically viable (Curran
and Seaton, 1997: 34). A more radical view is that of Herman and
Chomsky (1994), who hold that the reliance on advertising as a pri-
mary source of income inevitably leads to business interests (both
internal and external) directly controlling the content of the media.
They cite it as their second 'news filter' in their propaganda model of
the mass media. As if in support of this view, no grassroots titles are
willing to carry advertising that could interfere with their freedom
as a result of advertisers seeking to dictate the content of the rest of
the publication.
But we should also consider the possibility that advertising, even if it
were welcome, is simply not attractive enough to advertisers outside the
alternative public sphere and thus the revenue available from it is small.
This contradicts Comedia's claim that 'the relatively privileged economic
position of [the] readers' of the alternative press makes such titles attrac-
tive to advertisers wanting to target 'ABCl consumers'. We have already
noted that the producers of the titles under discussion are far from 'ABCl
consumers' themselves.
For all that, there is thus far little challenge to Comedia's main thesis,
that financial exigency will ensure that the alternative press remains in
its own 'ghetto'. But do all alternative publishers wish to break out of
the alternative ghetto? If in the place of 'ghetto' we posit 'alternative
public sphere', a very different picture emerges, one where the social and
cultural apparatus is every bit as diverse as that in the dominant public
sphere; where discussion, debate and the promulgation of ideas and opin-
ions take place within a complex articulated structure of economics,
organization and social action. These come together most conspicuously
in what John Downing describes as 'prefigurative politics, the attempt to
practice socialist principles in the present, not merely to imagine them for
the future' (Downing, 1984: 23). It is the methods employed to achieve
such aims that Comedia dismisses as idealistic and as displaying an igno-
rance of business practices in 'the real world'. Yet it can be shown that
such methods mesh with alternative fora for discussion and channels
for distribution in far more sophisticated ways than Comedia found.
In the 1990s, these were most conspicuous in the use of reprographic
technologies and distribution channels.
38 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

Reprographic Technologies

'Offset was exciting. Offset was freedom ... the copy could be pasted on
to the boards and, with no need for hot metal, or skilled printers, was
camera-ready' (Fountain, 1988: 24). What offset litho was to the pub-
lishers of Oz and IT, the photocopier was to the punk movement of the
late 1970s. Despite the fact that the alternative publisher was still depen-
dent on the printer, the offset process meant that, in Fountain's words,
'around five stages on conventional newspapers were leapfrogged'
(p. 112). On the other hand, the photocopier enabled editors to paste up
and print their own publications, which they did in their hundreds. The
photocopier opened up a new avenue for cheap, quick reproduction; it
was fast, clean and mostly reliable. The punk explosion of 1976 saw for
the first time dozens of music magazines published in photocopied for-
mats, using a variety of typewritten and hand-written formats, often illus-
trated with plagiarized graphics and photographs from the music press
and record sleeves:

Fanzines are the perfect expression - cheaper, more instant than records.
Maybe THE medium. A democratisation too - if the most committed 'new
wave' is about social change then the best fanzines express this. (Savage,
1991: 401; emphasis in original)

The fanzine (and, after it, the zine) offers a relatively cheap means of
communicating. Bob Bellerue, editor of the American zine Basura, in his
survey of zine publishing in the US proposes that '[t]he photocopier revo-
lution alone may be the central feature of the current zine explosion'
(Bellerue, 1995), and it is noteworthy that during the 1970s and the
1980s alternative publishers increasingly made use of reprographic tech-
nologies that made them, if not financially independent, at least techni-
cally independent. The arrival of the self-service photocopier, the
exploitation of workplace copiers and their provision in local community
centres have all enabled alternative publishers to reproduce titles quickly
and cheaply. (We must exclude The Big Issue from this analysis since,
despite its use of cheap newsprint, it has employed offset and extensive
colour throughout since its inception. Once again, this is a direct result
of the heavy subsidy from its earliest days.)
Some titles begin as photocopies, considering it progress to move to
offset when finance allows (if it ever does). Squall began as a cheaply
printed magazine with a mix of typewritten and hand-written copy
originated and pasted up by the editors. As it became established and its
circulation and its funding increased (however marginally), it moved
 TH E ECO NOM I CS 0 F PRODUCTION 39

quickly from a cheaply produced, cut-and-paste A5 magazine of a couple

of dozen pages to a thick, professionally typeset tabloid of some 70-odd
pages. This is explained in significant part by its aim to reach further
than its immediate, activist audience. A further experiment with format
has taken place amongst grassroots titles that have used the Internet
to raise their profile. Squall began by using its web site to advertise the
printed version, presenting a small selection of articles, illustrations
and subscription information as part of a wider site of related links to
other protests, campaigns and information sources. Since the cessation
of the printed version in 1997, the web site (www.squall.co.uk) has
developed into a full-blown on-line magazine. A hard copy version of
the articles and photographs on the site has been promised (when
funds permit).

Circulation

No product of the alternative press can ever hope to reach circulation

figures comparable with its mainstream counterparts. This can be
achieved only by extending circulation beyond the alternative public
sphere. The majority of the publications surveyed in the Royal
Commission on the Press's (1977) report on the alternative press had cir-
culations of 2,000 or less, yet this was nowhere considered a failure.
Comedia focuses on the economic success of two 'exceptions' in the
alternative press, New Socialist and New Internationalist, which, it says,
have broken out of the 'alternative ghetto' due to their sales of around
25,000 each. Data on the circulation of the contemporary alternative
press are not systematically collected; none of its titles are audited for cir-
culation, the only attempt at data collection being that by the magazine
Radical Bookseller in the early 1990s. 3 The circulation of Squall was
small, yet between 1992 and 1997 (when it published in print) its circu-
lation rose consistently. Though data for early issues are not available,
with no. 6 circulation had reached 1,500. This had doubled by the next
issue (Autumn 1994), whilst the circulation of Squall, 9 (its first tabloid
edition, appearing a little over a year later) was 5,000 (Malyon, 1995).
Circulation continued to improve: no. 14 (Autumn 1996, its penultimate
issue) had a circulation of 7,000, according to its editors (from an inter-
view conducted by the author).4
The Big Issue, by contrast, has a circulation significantly higher than
even many mainstream magazines. The combined circulation of its four
40 A LT ERN A T I V E M E0 I A

editions is estimated at almost half a million (Swithinbank, 1996); the

most recent audited circulation for its London edition is 132,787. By
mainstream standards, this is extremely successful. By alternative stan-
dards it is unimaginable. But is it possible to judge the success of an alter-
native title by its circulation alone? Is low circulation a necessary
indicator of 'failure'? For Aubrey (1981), it is. Given a choice between
high circulation of a handful of titles and smaller circulation across a
diverse and wider range, he promotes the former. Drawing on the expe-
riences of the underground press in the early 1970s, he argues that in that
era the impact of such consolidated (and influential) titles as Oz and IT
was diluted by the appearance of dozens of magazines ranging across all
man~er of topics: 'the women's movement, ecology, education, fringe
theatre, anarchism, scientific developments, fascism' (1981: 172). It was
this 'mass of magazines concerned with the fragments, and major slices,
of the non-aligned left opposition' that had in the late 1970s replaced 'at
a national level the underground press of cultural rebellion' (p. 167).
We should also take note of a more recent counter-argument from the
'younger generation' of zine publishers. The editors of the alternative
review zine Bypass have argued that hundreds of small circulation titles
not only encourage diversity of information and opinions but ensure the
survival of the alternative press: '[d]ecentralization not only gives people
a voice.... It may prove a key strategy for the survival of dissent, or even
just plain old independent thinking in a society that seems to be getting
more and more authoritarian every year' (cited by Atton, 1996a: 101).
The micro-press 'Oxford Institute of Social Disengineering' similarly con-
siders the proliferation of titles as a democratic strength: '[0]ne hundred
publications with a circulation of one thousand are one hundred times
better than one publication with a circulation of one hundred thousand'
(cited by Atton, 1996a: 133). In this both publishers are in agreement
with the Royal Commission on the Press, which also recognized multi-
plicity as a strength. This declaration appears to imitate that in an
unnamed advertising handbook of 1851:

a journal that circulates a thousand among the upper or middle classes is a

better medium than would be one circulating a hundred thousand among the
lower classes. (cited by Curran and Seaton, 1997: 35)

In any event, it certainly subverts the intention of the latter by privileging

diversity of titles - and, implicitly, the involvement of many hands - over
more elitist publications. Mark Pawson and Jason Skeet, two inveterate
self-publishers and mail artists, have similarly subverted other notions
of the media industry, coining the term 'narrow casting in fibre space'
in conscious imitation of the phrase 'broadcasting in cyberspace'. This
 THE ECONOMICS OF PRODUCTION 41

useful conceit brings together two notions that are disruptive of

mainstream media conceptions of communication. The first 'is intended
to counter the term broadcasting, the idea that the aim of all media pro-
duction is to reach as large an audience as possible' (Pawson and Skeet,
1995: 78); the second argues that multiplicity of production is best
achieved through paper-based media 'which are diversely available
throughout the alternative public sphere. Downing has also argued for
the impact that even a small-circulation paper can have (Downing, 1995).
He employs as an analogy the Boston Tea Party, an insignificant enough
event in itself that nevertheless sparked off a revolution: 'size alone was
no index of the impact ... [a]nd that is the beginning of wisdom in think-
ing about radical alternative media' (1995: 240). And although he is
silent on the matter 11 years earlier in his study of self-managed media
(Downing, 1984), the range of titles he chooses to examine - and the
range of circulation and audiences they exhibit - implies that he is accept-
ing of plurality, in the sense of a multiplicity of relatively small circula-
tion papers.
The argument is perhaps best settled by an appeal to historical contin-
gency; the period that most interests Aubrey (and Comedia/Minority
Press Group, of which he was a member) is the 1970s, a time when many
of the social and political ideas of feminism, environmentalism and
socialism were being developed by a largely youthful movement. In such
circumstances, it was important to build large memberships in order to
ensure a presence on demonstrations, in the mass media, in local elec-
tions. A handful of large-circulation titles would raise the profile and the
understanding of such new ideas better than numerous smaller and mar-
ginal publications. What Aubrey would now consider fragmentation is
the result of what many activist environmentalist campaigners see as an
unwelcome development in those radical organizations that have their
roots in the 1970s, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, where
organizational size and its attendant bureaucracy has minimized the
opportunity for grassroots participation and local, independent, small-
scale activist campaigning. It is the rise of such campaigning in the pre-
sent decade that has brought with it a range of publications, often
intended initially as local newsletters, but often (as in the case of Squall)
growing into nationally read and distributed publications. Furthermore,
strategies peculiar to the alternative press of the 1990s have been devel-
oped to enable a wider circulation of ideas than might be expected from
such a multiplicity of publications. These can be brought together under
the heading 'distributive use' to signify innovations in distribution that
confound simple calculations of circulation and their attendant analyses
of 'failure'.
42 A LTE RN ATIVE ME D IA

Distributive Use in the Alternative

Public Sphere

Here we must turn to other grassroots titles for evidence, since Squall
exemplifies distributive use in only one way. 'Distributive use' here refers
to two strategies of production and distribution that have been uniquely
developed within the alternative public sphere, and that are concerned
with the deliberate decentralization and relinquishment of control of the
processes of reproduction and distribution of alternative publications by
their original publishers. The two strategies are, in the language of the
alternative publishers of the 1990s, 'anti-copyright' (sometimes 'open
copyright') and 'open distribution'.

Anti-Copyright

In the alternative press of the 1990s there developed a radical view of

copyright with a strong movement against intellectual property rights.
Because the ethos of much alternative publishing is concerned with the
widest possible dissemination of unorthodox, dissident ideas using the
smallest amount of resources, many authors and publishers encourage
the free circulation of their material. Many books and journals will have
'anti-copyright' or 'open copyright' statements, indicating that the reader
or purchaser is free to copy as much of the document as they wish, pro-
vided that it is not for commercial purposes. It is expected that those
doing so might wish to make a charge to cover their duplicating costs, but
this is not expected to include a profit margin. Some titles explicitly
encourage the copying and distribution of the work in its entirety, only
asking that the original publisher is informed, so that they are kept aware
of the number of editions circulating. (Mter all, a small publisher on a
tight budget might decide that, due to the number and extent of pirate
editions in existence, there is no need for a reprint of the original edition.
It can then channel its energies into new titles.)
Although it has made no explicit statement regarding the copyright
status of its own content, the extremist environmental newspaper Green
Anarchist has itself benefited from anti-copyright publications. In common
with many other publications, it has reprinted articles by Bob Black and
Hakim Bey, two prolific and controversial writers in the alternative
milieu. In the 'zero-work' issue (no. 39, Autumn, 1995) there appeared a
lengthy article by Black ('Primitive Mfluence: a Postscript to Sahlins'); his
 THE ECON 0 M I C 5 0 F PRO Due T ION 43

article 'Technophilia: an Infantile Disorder' might be considered the

keynote article of the 'anti-technology issue' (no. 42, Summer, 1996).
Hakim Bey (a pseudonym for the writer Peter Lamborn Wilson) is best
known for his formulation of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (Bey,
1991, itself an 'anti-copyright' work), which has quickly become a sig-
nificant theoretical tool for many commentators within the alternative
public sphere (see McKay, 1996). 'Lascaux', a chapter from Radio
Sermonettes, also appears under Bey's name in the 'zero-work' issue of
Green Anarchist.
The value of having such work in a publication is twofold. First
and expediently, it fills a space. There will always be an anti-copyright
piece available that can be slotted into an issue, without the need to
worry about an author missing a deadline, or negotiating payment or
other conditions of publication. Second, prestige will attach to any publi-
cation that features such 'movement intellectuals' as Black and Bey; their
names will help to sell the publication. The writing style of such an
experienced polemicist as Black or of such a theorist as Bey can raise the
status of the publication, lending a welcome 'professionalism' (or at least,
a variety in tone and rhetoric) to what might otherwise be a monotonous
voice. Green Anarchist's house style, for example, is typically colloquial,
confrontational and militant. The inclusion of more 'intellectual' writers
might lead the 'floating' reader to suppose that these writers support Green
Anarchist's editorial viewpoint, leading such a reader to approach the rest
of the publication with more interest than they might otherwise do.
Squall, on the other hand, rather than reprinting the anti-copyright
work of others, assigned an 'open copyright' status to its own articles that
allowed copies to made for non-profit-making purposes. This waiving of
copyright is an extension of the concept of 'fair dealing' in copyright law
or of the licence given to educational institutions for the production of
multiple copies. Squall encouraged both individuals and groups or
organizations to copy any number of articles, in any quantity, not only for
private study (the limits of fair dealing and copyright permissions in edu-
cational institutions), but for distribution through channels apart from
the paper's own (this includes republication as pamphlets and booklets).
We should also note here the pirating of photographs and other graphic
materials in zines and in particular their 'detournement' to subvert the
original meaning of such items. Detournement is a strategy borrowed
from the situationists that involves 'taking elements from a social stereo-
type and, through their mutation and reversal, turning them against it...
[to produce] a parodic destabilization of the commodity-image' (Bonnett,
1991/1996: 193). It was most famously employed by the situationists in
their addition of revolutionary captions to strip cartoons. These practices
44 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

of 'guerrilla semiotics' seek to unmask hypocrisy and the corporate

ideology behind advertisements. Adbusters Quarterly specializes in
designing and publishing parodies of current major advertising cam-
paigns. It is especially well known for its versions of Calvin Klein's
Obsession and Absolut Vodka, at the same time as it reports on the
encroachment of advertising into such areas as public education. This
subversion has led to the portmanteau term 'subvertising' to describe
advertisements altered or redesigned to make a social or political point,
usually highlighting the activities of the business or product being adver-
tised. Such 'culture jamming' is examined briefly' yet authoritatively by
Mark Dery (1993). James Hamilton (2001a) offers valuable insights into
these practices and their similarity with the history of photomontage, in
particular with the work of John Heartfield. The work of the American
avant-garde music group Negativland (1995) uses samples of radio and
television programmes - as well as music - to create sonic collages that
function as commentaries, critiques and satires on aspects of the mass
media.

Open Distribution

Whilst anti-copyright as a common practice within the alternative public

sphere was a phenomenon of the 1990s, almost a decade before Squall for-
mulated its 'open copyright' statement the first issue of the class-struggle
anarchist news-sheet Counter Information (22 September 1984) encoura-
ged its readers to make free use of its contents 'as required, or for reprint-
ing'. To assist in the latter, it offered 'electrostencils or duplicate printing
plates'. This early version of what has come to be known as 'open distri-
bution' we must consider as purely experimental - moreover an experi-
ment that failed, since the offer has never been repeated. Squall did not
favour open distribution, preferring to retain control over all the copies
it published. However, the notion was taken up by Do or Die, the maga-
zine for the UK 'section' of the radical environmental movement Earth
First!. It, too, in its first issue, recommended open distribution as its pri-
mary form of distribution: 'if you've got access to cheap photocopying
facilities, print up copies of this yourself, we don't mind, we are not capi-
talists'. Its choice of format for this issue seems to have been made with
open distribution in mind; copies are A4 folded to A5 and unsewn, making
it easy for the 'reader-distributor' to dismantle the publication for copy-
ing. Unfortunately, a steady increase in the size of subsequent issues (the
first issue had 20 pages; its eighth issue, in 1999, had 344) has worked
 THE ECON a M I C 5 aF PRO Due T ION 45

against such wholesale reproduction, although it still declares itself

'@nti-copywrite - Copy and Distribute at will. Share information'. With
regret, the editors have now abandoned open distribution in the UK,
finding that improved sales through more professional production have
made this irrelevant. However, it is a method they still adopt to distrib-
ute cheaply overseas. The printing plates of issue no. 6 were sent to an
Earth First! group in the Czech Republic, enabling them to print copies
for their own distribution.
If Do or Die's desire to expand its pagination has eroded its ability to
participate in open distribution, the shorter SchNEWS, an activist
newsletter based in Brighton (normally two pages of A4) lends itself to
quick and cheap recopying and reprinting. Although it began life as a cen-
trally produced and distributed publication, within five months it was
offering its contents - in part or as a whole - to anyone who wished to
use it: 'Strictly @nticopyright - customise ... photocopy ... distribute'
(22 April 1995). As with Counter Information and Do or Die, it offered
'originals' to anyone who plans to copy it for further distribution (18
August 1995). Around 70 originals were sent out in this way in 1998 and,
whilst the editors do not track the number of all subsequent copies made
by the groups and individuals that receive it, CAMFIN (Cambridge Free
Information Network) regularly prints and distributes 200 copies from its
original. The SchNEWS web site also presents the paper in Portable
Document Format (PDF) files (which replicates the printed version) to
further encourage copying by readers. It has been estimated that the read-
ership of SchNEWS could be as high as 20,000, from a combination of
copying and visits to its web site (compared with a print run of between
2,500 and 5,000 per issue) (Searle, 1997: 125). It has remained resolutely
anti-copyright and pro-open distribution, and even encourages others to
establish their own version of SchNEWS, using as much of its content as
they wish. Edinburgh's Auld Reekie~s New Tattoo and Glasgow's
Solidarity are two such publications modelled on SchNEWS. By emulat-
ing the processes of the source publication (collectively written and
edited, anti-copyright and employing open distribution), further publica-
tions retain a radical power that avoids recuperation.

Alternative Fora as Methods of Distribution

So far The Big Issue, representing the contemporary advocacy press

in Britain, has been notable for the great differences between it and
the grassroots titles under discussion. Benefiting from strong financial
46 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

backing from a millionaire philanthropist, as well as from much advertising

revenue. Enjoying a circulation unimaginably higher than those of its
grassroots counterparts; it has achieved this not through high-street
retailers and newsagents but through street-selling. This is not a new
technique; working-class papers such as The Morning Star and Socialist
Worker have used street-selling for many years. Of the other titles men-
tioned in this chapter, SchNEWS is handed out free on the streets of
Brighton, where it is produced. Green Anarchist has a more extensive
street-selling network, but only 600 copies from its present circulation of
2,500 are sold in this way. What is startling about The Big Issue is its suc-
cess with this method. This is in part due to the large numbers of vendors
the system has attracted by providing work that raises their self-esteem
and makes them money (Berens, 1997). In Scotland the paper has 1,000
vendors; in London it has almost 6,000. But it is also due to the rigorous
organization behind the street-selling; whereas Green Anarchist is sold on
the street on an ad hoc basis by anyone who wishes to do so, The Big
Issue's system is tightly controlled: vendors receive training, sign a 'code
of conduct' and wear identity badges. In Scotland, for instance, the net-
work is co-ordinated by 60 full-time workers in five offices throughout
the country. 5
The Royal Commission on the Press (1977) found that the ability of the
alternative press to take advantage of mainstream distribution and retail
networks was very poor and that of all economic considerations in the
alternative press, 'distribution is the most difficult problem to be over-
come' (1977: 63). The failure of the alternative Publications Distribution
Co-operative in the 1980s was due to its inability to compete with main-
stream distributors. For, despite what Phil Kelly (1989) calls the 'collec-
tive commercial strength' acquired by the titles that made up the
Collective, it was still dependent on the major distribution chains Oohn
Menzies and WH Smith) for its penetration into newsagents'. Higher cir-
culation, more advertising, 'a more professional product' and 'repping'
directly to newsagents by the publishers - only when these requirements
were met would John Menzies and WH Smith be willing to take the
Collective's titles (Minority Press Group, 1980a).6 Alternative publica-
tions are not always better off with alternative distributors for other
reasons. The editor of the American anarchist magazine The Match!
has recounted his chronic problems with the alternative distributor Fine
Print which, he alleges, consistently refused to pay him for copies of his
publication that they were distributing (Woodworth~ 1995). His criticism
goes beyond non-payment: he is also concerned with control over the
market, creating monopolies the equal of any mainstream enterprise. He
notes that in 1995, Fine Print were distributing to 323 bookshops in the
 TH E ECO N OM I CS 0 F PRO DUCTI 0 N 47

us - '323 bookstores that the magazine you are holding cannot get into,
because they haven't had contracts with Fine Print and aren't about to
order from a single unrepresented publisher such as ourselves. Yes, I call
that control' (1995: 55). Since then Fine Print has gone bankrupt, leaving
many titles unpaid. It may well be that the alternative distributor that fails
does not simply fail to get the alternative media into bookshops and
newsagents; it may be responsible for their demise.
Not all publications find their way barred to direct distribution to
shops. Many publications in the UK deal directly with alternative book-
shops and other fora within the alternative public sphere. The first might
be considered analogous to mainstream channels. These are the alternative
bookshops such as Compendium and Housmans in London, Mushroom
in Nottingham and alternative distributors such as AK, Counter Productions
and Turnaround. As primary methods of distribution and retail they have
remained largely unchanged since the 1960s, though the 1990s saw the
rise of a number of specifically anarchist distributors such as DS4A, Slab-
o-Concrete and the largest, AK. Second are channels whose primary func-
tion is not the distribution or retail of alternative press titles, but which are
nevertheless primary constituents of the alternative public sphere -
amongst them vegetarian cafes, independent record shops and the latest
manifestations of the 1960s 'head shops', selling jewellery, clothes and
paraphernalia for the dope-smoker. All of these provide fora for the
discussion of alternative and radical ideas and opinions.
In the 1990s, a third category was added. To view it as a composite of
the first two is to only partially describe its interrelated, multi-functional
significance within the alternative public sphere. This is the 'infoshop', a
phenomenon that grew out of the squatted anarchist centres of the
1980s, such as the 121 Centre in Brixton, London. As the term suggests,
central to the function of an infoshop is the dissemination of informa-
tion, for example by acting as an alternative Citizens Advice Bureau to
claimants and squatters. It might offer a reading room of alternative pub-
lications, perhaps even a small library. It acts as a distribution point for
free publications, and as a retail outlet for priced publications. Importantly,
it provides cheap do-it-yourself design and reprographic services to alter-
native publishers. (At its most basic, this might be a table and a photo-
copier. Some infoshops will have professional DTP facilities, however.) It
can act as a 'mail-drop' for alternative publishers and local activist groups
(an important function when the publisher or group contact is living in
squatted premises, unsure of their future and unable to afford a PO box).
Finally, it might offer space for discussions, meetings, concerts and exhi-
bitions.? The rise of activist video in the 1990s and in particular the alter-
native news video Undercurrents (founded in 1993) prompted many
48 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

infoshops to present public screenings and discussions of such features.

Not only are these able to act as spurs to action and debate, their pur-
chase by the infoshop displaces the cost of purchase by individual view-
ers. In sum, the infoshop provides a forum for alternative cultural,
economic, political and social activities. Its typical range is described in a
flyer circulated by the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh (ACE) to
announce its founding in 1996:

• Advice and solidarity against dole harassment

• A meeting place for community-political groups
• Radical books, 'zines, and information
• A low-cost vegan cafe and drop-in centre
• Local arts and crafts
• Underground records, demos, t-shirts, badges
• People's food co-operative
• Socializing in an anti-sexist, -racist, or -homophobic environment
• An epicenter of alternative/DIY kulture (Spelling and emphasis in original.)

Whilst ACE has not yet achieved all these (it has not, for instance, estab-
lished a food co-op), its aims are common to all such centres. It also exem-
plifies the close relationship the alternative press can have with an
infoshop. ACE and Counter Information have in common a number of
workers; editorial meetings for the paper are held at ACE; computing
equipment there is used to layout the paper and organize its web site. In
return, the information network of which Counter Information is a part,
and through which it keeps up to date with events of interest to it and its
readers, supplies ACE with its publications; after they have been used to
inform stories in the paper or to make contact with activists, the alterna-
tive press titles received by Counter Information are used to establish the
infoshop at ACE: an archive of newspapers, magazines, newsletters, flyers
and posters on topics relevant to ACE's users. Since Counter Information
is part of national and international networks for such exchanges of infor-
mation, ACE is itself able to contribute to infoshops across the country -
and, indeed, the world - through contacts made by Counter Information
and the other publications produced by groups that use ACE. The activist
unemployed group Edinburgh Claimants, for example, produces its own
newsletter, Dole Harassment Exposed!. Moreover, Edinburgh Claimants
is part of a wider network of anarchist unemployed groups in the UK,
known as Groundswell (see Shore, 1997 for an overview). Once again, the
value of the network as a central communications strategy is highlighted. 8
This network is in continual flux: publications come and go; infoshops
come and go. Following its eviction from premises owned by Edinburgh
City Council in 1994, ACE spent two years as a 'virtual' centre, with
no physical location, yet continuing its function as a disseminator of
 THE ECON 0 M I C S 0 F PRO Due T ION 49

information. As a point of contact and a mail drop it used the address of

another node (so to speak) on the alternative network, Edinburgh's Peace
and Justice Centre. Though it is now established with its own premises,
the future of ACE is uncertain: it occupies a rented shop front with no
long-term lease and must regularly find the money to pay the rent and bills
from a very low income. Such a marginal existence is common amongst
the alternative press; it is also common amongst institutions of the alter-
native public sphere. Yet this is not necessarily a cause for worry amongst
those involved: Hakim Bey's (1991) formulation of the Temporary
Autonomous Zone (TAZ) emphasizes the transient nature of such institu-
tions; he argues that this will aid their invisibility and prevent 'the State'
from identifying and thereby neutralizing their activities. George McKay
warns against highlighting the transient nature of all such institutions,
however. Whilst transience might be an appropriate enough mode for
travelling people or for occasional parties and festivals, he stresses the
'possibility or desirability of permanent effectiveness, of transformation
rather than simply transgression' (McKay, 1996: 156). McKay looks for
'transgressive constancy' in such actions, expecting history to show that
there was more consistency and permanence in the ideas and actions that
filled these spaces, despite the temporary nature of their existence.
Amongst those in the alternative public sphere, however, the notion of
the TAZ is still an attractive one, if only because it acts as a leveller, pre-
venting anyone institution or publication from gaining authority over
the rest. An article in Green Anarchist by Alder Valley Anarchists
enthused about the notion of the TAZ, seeing it in many manifestations
of the alternative institutions: 'our own space, whether a co-op or squat
or anarchist desert island, anywhere where we can create an organic,
Green, natural, wild commune' (Alder Valley Anarchists, 'Temporary
Autonomous Zone', GA 49/50, Autumn, 1997: 16). In the same issue, an
anonymous article celebrates the impermanence of Green Anarchist.
Under threat as a result of conspiracy charges against four of its editors,
the article insists: '[i]n the end, it doesn't matter what happens to GA.
There will be other publications, better theories, better analysis. A zine is
just a zine but the revolution is for keeps' ('Gandalf in Court', ibid.: 11).

The Limits and Freedom of

'Alternative Economics'

That the alternative press cannot compete with the mainstream press in
terms of finance, circulation or distribution is, for Comedia, due to the
50 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

alternative press's over-reliance on prefigurative politics as a determinant

of its economic and organizational activities. (I follow Downing in
defining prefigurative politics as 'the attempt to practice socialist princi-
pIes in the present, not merely to i~agine them for the future', Downing,
1984: 23). This argument persists to the present, and the experience of
The Big Issue can be used to show how 'success' can be assured only if
strong leadership is in place, along with substantial financial backing
(there has been much interest in the mass media on the ebullient person-
ality of John Bird, editor of The Big Issue). The press that ignores the
'reality' of economic life under capitalism will always fail in its project
(and, on Comedia's reasoning, will deserve to fail).
Such an argument, however, is based on a narrow view of the alter-
native press as an economic rival to its mainstream counterpart; a view
that it is merely in competition with the mainstream in terms of products
and 'market penetration', but no more. Yet far from being in competition,
the alternative press actively rejects the economic conditions of the main-
stream, even to the extent of developing innovative forms of distribution.
Its recurrent financial crises are due less to the unwillingness to adopt
strategies of financial planning and more to do with the integration of the
activities of economic production into the lives of its participants and the
integration of the press itself into the alternative public sphere. We have
seen how the infoshop describes this in microcosm, where an alternative
economic strategy (what has been called a 'black and green economy',
recalling the colours representing anarchism and environmentalism) is
integrated with other social, cultural and political activities.
Rather than prefigurative methods of economics and organization
being barriers to the development of the alternative press, we might con-
sider them essential components of media that seek to integrate them-
selves with the movements they are supporting, reporting and, indeed,
developing. This argument is supported by Downing (1984) in his study
of 'self-managed media'. Such a designation is useful in that it reminds us
that the alternative press can be considered as quite inseparable from the
alternative public sphere. The relationship is mutual and synergetic; the
alternative public sphere provides opportunities and outlets for the pro-
duction and consumption of the alternative press, at the same time as the
press itself provides material that sustains the sphere's function as a place
for the formulation, discussion and debate of radical and dissenting ideas.
The Big Issue fits uneasily into this model; its economic strategy is drawn
from the media of the dominant public sphere, yet its method of distri-
bution is a hybrid. Whilst its sites of distribution are public spaces and
emphatically not those of an alternative culture, its approach is radical
enough to have opened up an alternative space of sorts within those public
 THE ECONOMICS OF PRODUCTION 51

spaces, where regular acts of dialogue and discussion now accompany a

commercial transaction; it has been estimated that a quarter of a million
people talk to the vendors about homelessness (Swithinbank, 1996). Such
an opening up of dialogue in an arena hitherto unknown to such activity
(before this, talk was more likely to be one-way, 'them and us', not dia-
logical) is surely an example of Downing's 'moments of transformation'.9
When we turn to the grassroots press, that is, to the alternative press con-
strued as an inseparable part of the alternative public sphere' and as an
enterprise managed by the same people who participate in opinion for-
mation, then such moments also might very well entail 'inchoate organi-
zational models for future political formations' (Duncombe, 1996: 313),
that by their incompleteness are less efficient or effective than their main-
stream counterparts. But such shortcomings need not be interpreted as
failure. The value of such pre-figurative projects proceeds not simply
from their content - from their attitude to the oppressive relations of
production that mark our society - but from their position within those
relations.
The overarching economic conditions in which the grassroots alterna-
tive press chooses to place itself are emphatically anti-commercial, more
concerned with the creation of a 'black and green economy' than with
direct competition with the mainstream press, whether in terms of markets
or of production economics. Such a commitment brings with it a com-
mitment to the decentralization and sharing of resources as well as to
the educational and empowering potential of the methods employed to
construct alternative media, in order to increase participation in their
activities.
Alternative media are, or should be, interactive, concerned with every-
day life and the ordinary needs of people, not simply with the economy
and economic determinism. Collective organization then takes on a differ-
ent aspect and becomes an attempt to include the readership in decision-
making. Downing has briefly referred to how the 'active audiences' of
much critical media studies research 'are but one step away from being
media creators and producers themselves' (Downing, 1995: 241). In her
account of alternative video production with AIDS patients, Alexandra
Juhasz summarizes one aspect of this radical repositioning of the audi-
ence thus: 'to look is to see and know yourself, not the other' (Juhasz,
1995: 138). The vertical, top-down communication that is typical of
most media is simply inappropriate here; horizontal communication
between writers and readers (some people will be both, of course) and
between different manifestations of alternative media will be crucial in
furthering the primary aim of social change. Through Traber and Down-
ing we can argue that such methods of communication and alternative
52 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

forms of production and distribution are far from mere ideological

fixities; instead they spring naturally from the nature of alternative media
conceived as methods of achieving social and political action.

Notes

1. Gholam Khiabany (2000) has argued interestingly that even when

Comedia's commercial strategy is followed it has led to failure and cites the
monthly Red Pepper as evidence. By contrast the section of the alternative press
that has proved successful (in attracting more readers and lasting longer) on
Khiabany's somewhat uncritical terms is the working-class or socialist press (such
as Militant and Socialist Worker).
2. Downing's is not the only formulation of an alternative public sphere, but
his offers the best 'fit' for the present study. Negt and Kluge (1972/1983) had
first posited such a sphere - strictly a working-class public sphere - in response
to Habermas's bourgeois formulation. They make no mention of the place of
media in this sphere, however. Apart from Downing, only Jakubowicz (1991) has
adapted the concept of the public sphere to a more inclusive vision of communi-
cation and media. He identifies alternative public spheres in his study of Poland
in the 1980s: an oppositional public sphere and an alternative one. But the
historical and political contingencies of his study render his work of limited
applicability to Britain in the twenty-first century. In particular this is because his
definition of 'alternative' is reserved for the activities of the Polish Roman
Catholic Church, its newspapers and periodicals, whilst 'oppositional' refers to
the samizdat publications of the Solidarity movement.
3. A special issue of the magazine (no. 71, [March-April?] 1990 and The
Radical Bookseller Directory (1992 - the only edition that appeared» that
updates it included circulation figures for some of the titles it listed. These data
were however supplied by the publications themselves. Chan (1995: 67) provides
more recent figures for a handful of anarchist journals.
4. Searle (1997: 125) flatly asserts that Squalfs readership 'is far higher' than
its print run, though she offers no figure. Jim Carey, one of Squalfs editors, how-
ever, draws on the results of a questionnaire sent out to subscribers. From an
analysis of the 400 replies (half of the total number of subscribers) he finds that:
'an average of 5.5 people read each single copy of Squall, with the majority of
respondents tending to pass the publication around; an inspiring communal
network' (Carey, 1998: 73).
Carey observes that these subscribers make up only a seventh of Squall's reader-
ship (though my findings indicate a lower proportion) and are largely those with
'stable addresses'. Given Squall's primary audience and subject matter ('sorted
itinerants' with 'unstable addresses'), it is reasonable to expect that copies will be
shared at least as much - probably more - in the communal settings in which such
people live. Carey's extrapolated estimate of a readership of 35,000 may even be
conservative, therefore. The 'free spaces' in which all five titles circulate (protest
sites, infoshops, festivals, squats, communes) - all of which are typified in part by
 THE ECONOMICS OF PRODUCTION 53

shared resources - will ensure that readerships are in general 'far higher' than
circulation figures, though how much higher remains to be discovered.
5. The Scottish figures are taken from a talk given by Mel Young, director of
The Big Issue in Scotland, at the Edinburgh Peace Forum, 28 October 1996. The
number of vendors in London appears in Berens (1997).
6. In 1996 a further attempt to establish a periodicals distribution network that
is capable of getting alternative titles onto newsagents' shelves was underway.
INK, calling itself both the 'Independent News Collective' and 'The Association
of Radical and Alternative Publishers', has indeed begun 'repping' directly with
newsagents and has so far identified '150 newsagents willing to take INK titles'
(INK Update, October 1996). Whilst this was undoubtedly an achievement, it
represents only a tiny percentage of the newsagents in Britain. Counting only the
28,500 members of the National Federation of Retail Newsagents (Henderson
and Henderson, 1996), 150 represents just over 0.5 per cent of the total. If'mul-
tiple newsagents' and other retail outlets for periodicals are included, this figure
could be as low as 0.25 per cent. Since its launch, there has been little evidence
of INK's success.
7. Corollaries of the infoshop are to be found throughout the history of the
alternative press, though none that precisely replicate it in its contemporary mani-
festation. Striking forerunners, however, appear in accounts of the radical press
of previous centuries. Christopher Hill cites Giles Calvert's print shop which
functioned during the English Revolution as both radical press and meeting-place
and 'perhaps came nearest to uniting the radicals in spite of themselves' (Hill,
1975: 373). A century and a half later, John Doherty's 'Coffee and Newsroom',
attached to his Manchester bookshop, was a haven for radicals, where no fewer
than 96 newspapers were taken every week, including the illegal 'unstamped'
(Thompson, 1963/1991: 789). More recent are the centri sociali in Italy which
emerged around 1980 as centres 'where young people could work out their own
tactics for living and develop their own cultural forms' (Downing, 2001: 294).
8. The network of infoshops in the UK is, for all its importance, not as
highly developed as that in the US, which in the first half of the 1990s had its
own organizational network, the Network of Anarchist Collectives, and its own
networking zine (Dis)Connection (Munson, 1997; apparently the network and
the zine are 'no longer active': Dodge, 1998: 63). By contrast, some of the
most significant achievements of centres similar to ACE have been las a result
of individual, local campaigning. Exemplary here is Bradford's 1 in 12 Club's
campaign for a review of the city's public CCTV systems (documented in '1 in
12 Celebrates Success in Campaign against CCT-V' and 'Class War 73', Black
Flag, 212 (1997), p. 3 and p. 6 respectively).
9. It may be that such 'moments' also take place during street sales of Green
Anarchist, though there is no evidence to confirm this. The relative failure of
Green Anarchist to achieve large numbers of street sales is due not only to its
looser organizational structure, but probably also to its selling an ideology rather
than a charitable cause.
 ©w~n~IJl~®
3
what use is a zine?
identity-building and
social signification in
zine culture

his chapter seeks to understand the production of zines and 'zine

T culture' in terms of the possibility they offer for building identity

and community amongst their readers and writers. The term 'zine'
was established in the 1980s to refer to a far wider range of amateur pub-
lications than could be encompassed by 'fanzine'. Fanzines are primarily
concerned with the object of their attention (works of literature, music,
films, or other cultural activities), though this is not to say that they are
solely about consumption. John Fiske (1989/1991: 151) has argued that
they are 'cultural producers, not cultural consumers'. In his exploration of
the cultural practices of science fiction fans Henry Jenkins (1992) argues
that 'fandom constitutes a particular Art World' that is based on the pro-
duction of its own texts such as stories, pictures, videos and music-making
(the latter known as 'filking'). He shows how fandom also constitutes 'an
alternative social community' where cultural production is employed 'as a
means of building and maintaining solidarity within the fan community'
(p. 213). Clearly fanzines are major sites of this cultural production.
Fanzines can also represent or stand in for, and activate or establish, a
community. I want to argue that, in the case of zines, there is a movement
away from the reception of primary texts (programmes, books, genres)
and production as a consequence of that reception: in many cases those
who produce zines ('zinesters') turn to themselves, to their own lives, their
own experiences, and turn these into the subjects of their writing. At the
heart of zine culture is not the study of the 'other' (celebrity, cultural
 WHAT USE I S A Z IN E? 55

object or activity) but the study of self, of personal expression, sociality

and the building of community. Indeed, the zine may be chiefly construed
as promoting sociality. It is dialogical in intent and offers itself as a token
for social relations. In the second half of the chapter I shall explore the
transformation of zines on the Internet, in particular how the notions
of identity, sociality and community found in printed-zine culture are
re-positioned through technical agents such as hyperlinking. There appears
to be a rupture between two cultures: between the emerging, diffuse and
inclusive e-zine culture and the more established, stable and (to a degree)
exclusive nature of printed zine culture.

A Little History of Fanzines

The loss of the prefix 'fan' from 'fanzine' forces a re-examination of the
zine as a site of 'marginal' cultural production and of its predecessor as
the seedbed for such a change. What lies in the history of the fanzine to
prepare for such a change? The fanzine is the quintessence of amateur,
self-published journalism. It is typified for the most part by a single
editor with a small pool of writers, though just as often entire issues are
written by the editor. The editor will be responsible for the layout,
design, typing, paste-up, and will arrange the printing and distribution
and control the finances. It is almost superfluous to add that this editor
will have the final say on everything that goes into the fanzine - as dra-
conian a decision-maker as any tyrannical newspaper owner. This control
stems from purity of expression: the fanzine is as much to do with
expressing that editor's own desires, opinions and beliefs on a chosen
topic as it is about informing or educating - or even communicating to -
others. Inevitably, fanzines will express more than this: it is impossible to
reduce the rationale behind establishing a fanzine to a single impetus.
Michelle Rau (1994) argues that precursors of fanzine publishing are to
be found in the amateur journalism of the second half of the 1800s, parti-
cularly with the establishment in the US of the amateur press associations
beginning with the foundation of the first of these, the national Amateur
Press Association in 1876. Rau traces the origin of fanzines as they are
generally understood - as self-published magazines written and produced
by fans of a specific cultural form or of an actor or creator within that
form (a genre of fiction, of music, of film; an author, a musician, a film
star) - back to the science fiction magazines of the late 1920s. Titles such
as Amazing Stories not only presented short stories in the genre but also
56 A LT ERN A T IV E M ED I A

gave space to readers to discuss the science upon which the stories were
premised. The first science fiction fan magazine - The Comet - appeared
in 1930, published by the Science Correspondence Club. In the 1930s we
see the appearance of 'comics fandom' in the US. Science fiction and
comic fanzines were necessary to their writers and readers in order to
validate genres of fiction that were generally ignored or reviled by the
mainstream critics. They also functioned as virtual communities, bringing
together fans geographically and socially distant from one another. As
Martin Barker (1984) has shown in the case of horror comics, establish-
ing a fanzine might also be to take a political stance against the enforced
morality of elite groups in society. These three characteristics - the vali-
dation of a marginalized cultural activity, the formation of community,
and publishing as political action - can also be found in subsequent gen-
erations of fanzine publishing, most visibly in the punk fanzines of the
1970s and the zines of the 1980s and 1990s.
Michelle Rau suggests that the stock market crash of 1929, the
Depression and wartime rationing all contributed to a diminution in ama-
teur publishing. The avant-garde art movements of the 1950s and 1960s
she sees as engaging in 'fanzine-like activity' through their attempts to
democratize artistic production such as mail art (Held, 1991). Though not
an unreasonable claim, it seems to require a revision of the meaning and
functions of publishing in previous artistic movements such as Dada and
surrealism: whatever their revolutionary aims, the protagonists and their
products in such movements were firmly located in the value discourses of
high art. In these cases, publications were not 'amateur' they were 'privately
published'. Print runs were not contingently limited (by finance, by the
limits of a technology, by a small audience), they were 'limited' to promote
their collectability. Similarly, whilst it is possible to see similar impulses to
those of fanzine publishers at work in the underground newspapers and
magazines of the 1960s (especially to do with the formation of alternative
communities, political resistance and notions of freedom and liberation),
there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the fanzine continued through-
out this period, if obscured by the impact and (perceived) significance of
what Rau has termed the 'aboveground underground press' such as Oz and
IT in the UK, Village Voice and Rat in the us. In the shadow of these papers
flourished fanzines dealing with specialist musical genres (often overlooked
by the underground press) such as early rock'n' roll, rhythm and blues,
jazz and soul. Fanzines devoted to poetry, detective fiction and the peren-
nial science fiction also continued. It is tempting to see these fanzines as a
'true' underground, their activities coming to wider public knowledge -
and to the attention of academics - only when the underground press began
to disappear or turn mainstream in the early 1970s.
 W H AT USE I S A Z I N E? 57

For cultural commentators and academics alike, the punk movement of

1976-77 was the next watershed for the fanzine. Here we find the argu-
ment that the fanzine is not merely a medium for a marginalized cultural
activity, it is definitively subcultural in its origins and intent. Taking as a
given the contestable thesis that punk was essentially working-class in
origin, Dick Hebdige argued that the radical bricolage that characterized
the visual language of punk fanzines could be seen as 'homologous with
punk's subterranean and anarchic style' (Hebdige, 1979: 112). Like the
music it promoted, the punk fanzine's prime interest was in 'the destruc-
tion of existing codes and the formulation of new ones' (Hebdige, 1979:
119). The dominant sociological understanding of the fanzine is that the
power of 'amateur' work lies in its subcultural location. Consequently,
the defining moment of fanzine publishing identified as the symbolic
product of troubled youth, of rebellion, of subcultural struggle, is the
punk fanzine of the latter half of the 1970s. This argument dies hard:
Teal Triggs's survey of British fanzines begins with punk: '[f]anzines are
vehicles of subcultural communication' (Triggs, 1995: 74). The punk
fanzine continues to be considered as constitutive of a subculture: 'Zines
are punk', declared an anonymous editor of Hippycore (Rutherford,
1992: 3). By claiming that the fanzine is subcultural in origin, we run the
risk of collapsing a range of class positions, social relations, political and
cultural ends, and claims to solidarity and opposition into a social setting
that is essentially structural.
Similarly, the roots of the British football fanzine have been seen to lie
in the punk fanzine. ]ary, Horne and Bucke (1991: 584) find in them 'the
same orientation to contradiction, the oppositional stance, mentioned by
Hebdige'; Shaw (1989) notes that some editors of punk fanzines went on
to edit football fanzines. There are two arguments here: the first hopes to
see homologies between two groups of fanzines based on their identity as
sites of 'cultural contestation', the second is perhaps the weaker, struc-
turally speaking, having more to do with the punk fanzine as a spur to
continued publishing in different cultural fields. In some cases, the two
converge, particularly where politically active punk fanzine editors estab-
lished football fanzines that espoused similar causes, such as the anti-
racist Leeds United fanzine Marching Altogether. 1 If we insist on remaking
all football fanzines (and all other instances of fanzines and zines, as
Triggs seems to want) as essentially subcultural, we end up remaking 'sub-
culture' as little more than a label for marginal or out-of-the-way media
production; shorn of its class distinction, it ceases to have any explana-
tory power. Angela McRobbie (1993/1994: 179) has already argued that
'[t]here is certainly no longer a case to be made for the traditional argument
that youth culture is produced somehow in conditions of working-class
58 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

purity'. Andy Bennett (1999) has suggested Maffesoli's concept of tribus

to replace 'subculture' as an analytic category to explain the more fluid
nature of sociality that is a feature of late modern society, especially
where notions of identity and sociality are less 'given' by structural con-
ditions and are instead constructed by social actors in evolving, shifting
'communities'.

Zines and Sociality

It is from this position that I want to explore zine culture: from the per-
spective of social relations. To do this is to focus less on defining the zine
in terms of unique, homogeneous content and more on exploring the
processes, formations and significations that constitute zine culture (and
that are themselves constituted by that culture). This is to go well
beyond the over-generalizing and under-theorized definitions of the zine
such as that offered by Cheryl Zobel (1999: 5): 'zines are self-edited,
self-financed and self-published serials', a definition that can equally
apply to little magazines dealing with poetry and fiction. We might con-
sider the prefix 'self-' to refer to any publication that is not corporately
financed. From this position it is tempting to include any independent
serial publication published, edited or written by any number of people.
Whilst we should not insist on the 'one editor, one writer' model in all
cases, there is a danger that by accepting a definition as wide as Zobel's
we admit as zines any non-corporate publication, regardless of its methods
of production. Attempts to define zines in terms of their content are no
more useful. In the introduction to his study of US zines in the 1990s,
Stephen Duncombe (1997) presents a range of categories drawn from
the American 'clearing-house zine', Factsheet Five - a 'zine taxonomy'
that at the broadest level divides into: 'traditional' fanzines interested in
cultural genres such as science fiction, popular music, sports, hobbies
and pastimes; and (since the 1980s) 'zines' that go beyond fan writing to
cover an extremely wide spread of subjects, including politics, the per-
sonal (perzines), 'fringe culture', and issues surrounding sexuality and
sexual practices and life at work. At both levels of generality, almost any
niche publication could be considered a zine. The use of the term in
mainstream culture seems to expect this. Many large record shops now
have a section devoted to zines in which it is possible to find examples
that range from the intermittent, short-run, singly-edited punk zine to
the glossy alternative music monthly that boasts staff writers, department
 W HAT USE IS A Z IN E? 59

editors and a photographic and graphic design team. Here the term is
surely being used in much the same way that genre labels such as 'indie'
and 'alternative' are employed by record companies, to, as Simon Frith
(1996: 76) has it, 'defin[e] music in its market or, alternatively,
the market in its music' in order to convert creative activity into a
commodity.
A more fruitful route can be found by exploring Stephen Burt's argu-
ment that 'zines are always cheap, often bartered, and personal by defi-
nition' (Burt, 1999: 148). This is not to insist on the purity of the
single-editor definition, though it is certainly to remain close to that
model. First let us examine the economic claims of Burt's argument.
Though not universal, the barter system is common within zine culture.
Zines are traded between editors not necessarily according to a fixed
monetary or exchange rate; a single copy of an extensive, highly profes-
sional zine may attract an exchange of a number of issues of another edi-
tor's smaller, more cheaply produced publication. Others are simply
happy to swap one zine for another. Whilst it is an exaggeration to say
that no money ever changes hands - many zines do ask for money, many
offer subscriptions - this is usually only one method of payment. Stamps
are a popular currency; many editors only ask for a stamped, addressed
envelope in which to send the zine to the reader. With relatively few
exceptions (such as the high-circulation, professionally produced zines,
usually focusing on music and already inhabiting that grey area between
zine and niche publication), zines are available in such a variety of eco-
nomic methods as to make them almost universally available (banking
charges between countries is not a problem, for instance, where there are
other ways of 'purchase'); they are almost invariably cheap. Moreover,
despite the inevitable cost of production, there is little interest amongst
most zine producers in profit. Many zines run at a continual loss, the
costs incurred being acceptable as the price of communication and self-
valorization. The fluidity of the medium and expectations about layout
and frequency mean that editors are able to publish when they are finan-
cially solvent; there is little pressure on them to maintain a regular sched-
ule. This is not to ignore the periodicity of a zine, or the finiteness that
publication can have: however irregular, there is a value in producing an
item, not least because it stands for more than simply a product.
Operating in this way at low or no cost, maintaining contacts and
encouraging readerships, zine exchange can be considered a kind of gift
relationship, where altruism plays no little part.
The zine as a medium here stands in for a social relationship: it is a
token to be exchanged in all its forms. Even when the zine is used as a
commodity transaction, it carries with it something of the obligation that
60 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

a gift exchange carries: rather than being just a magazine bought from a
vendor, the zine is almost invariably bought from an individual and is a
product of that individual's labour, a sign of their individuality. Even
when bought, then, the zine is the token in a gift relationship: 'gift econo-
mies are driven by social relations while commodity economies are driven
by price' (Kollock, 1999: 222).2 The acquisition of zines is surrounded by
its own etiquette that expects readers to 'be patient - doing zines is rough
and it takes time to answer mail and fill out orders' (Dyer, no date).
Readers are encouraged to tell zine editors where they saw their zine
listed, in order to maintain and monitor the most valuable parts of the
zine network and they are reminded that 'zine editors ... love mail'
(ibid.) - indeed, mail is surely at the heart of this amateur enterprise,
where economic and cultural access are equalized towards an immense
range of publications that, more or less, are the physical manifestation of
a social relationship (or at least the tentative beginnings of one). Such is
zine culture as it has developed.
I turn now to the second part of Burt's assertion, his emphasis on the
zine as 'personal by definition'. I am concerned here with what Janice
Radway (1999) has called 'the possibility of the social', rather than with
the zine as a site for the promotion of instrumental ends. 3 We might con-
sider two types of sociability: internal and external. Internal sociability
privileges the transformation of formal and professional methods of
organization, production, editing and writing. There can be something of
the ludic, even the festive, in these activities. Where it involves more than
one person, zine production is often the site for social gatherings (such as
those that take place during the final stages of production: the 'mail-out
party' might bring together editor and writers to collate, fold and staple
copies of the zine, as well as address and stamp envelopes). Zines offer
the possibility for creativity within a social setting and of production that
is structured not as a separate occupational duty (and certainly not as a
professional activity) but as part of the activities of everyday life.
External social relationships are based on a desire to establish relations
(a community, even) through the medium of the zine. The zines I focus
on below are generally inward-looking, whether on a personal level or
from a small, community-of-interest perspective. It is not that the exter-
nal world does not exist, but it is not an object for change. It is most often
a source of negative influence, of constraint, from which the zine editor
seeks refuge or solace within their own constructed community. If 'zine'
is to hold any specific meaning beyond being an eroded catch-all term for
any self-published or small-circulation periodical, it lies in an emphasis
on the personal. This is not to say that the only zines that matter are
'perzines' - that is, those that deal exclusively with the editor's everyday
 WHAT USE IS A ZINE? 61

life) - although I follow Duncombe in arguing that the personal is 'a

central ethic of all zines' (Duncombe, 1997: 26). As predecessor of the
zine, the fanzine also dealt with highly personal tastes and perspectives,
yet was ultimately about cultural consumption. The zine offers a similar
examination and presentation of matters beyond itself but appears more
interested in the lived relationship of the individual zine writer to the
world, from which position develops the possibility of the social. The cases
that follow explore this movement - from the personal to the social - by
considering a range of zines (and their editors) which show that the per-
sonal, the social (and the communal) may be realized in zine culture in
differing ways.

Cases: bamboo girl, cometbus,

pilgrims and MAXIMUMROCKNROLL

I begin with an unreservedly personal example, the US zine Bamboo Girl -

written, designed and produced by one woman living in New York City.
'Sabrina Sandata' defines herself as being of 'mixed blood' ('Filipina ...
Spanish and Irish/Scottish, with some Chinese'). She began her zine upon
finding her identity and social position conflictual and uncomfortable as
a lesbian punk within an Asian culture where heterosexuality, patriarchy
and 'beauty' were the norms:

punk and hardcore music/culture helped a lot with helping me [sic] to fur-
ther form my issues, and also gave me the validation I need for not being the
beautiful petite Asian flower all my friends were. (Bamboo Girl,S, 1996,
unpaginated)

She writes about her own experiences as she crosses from one social
world to another, interviews other women in similar situations (such as
the 'all-girl band' Super Junky Monkey from Japan and Julie Tolentino,
the 'mixed-blood dyke' owner of New York City's Clit Club. She is as
likely to review a slew of locally distributed punk singles as she is to cri-
tique the dominance of the beauty pageant in Filipin culture. Her graf-
fitied reproduction of an advertisement for whitening cream detournes
its text into neo-colonialist propaganda. She also seeks to retrieve aspects
of her culture for feminist readings: her soubriquet 'Sandata' is a Tagalog
word which carries the sense of weapon as a defensive tool and a
harvesting tool: the domestic as martial; feminism arising from the every-
day; militancy alongside the production of the daily bread. Bamboo Girl
62 A LT ERN AT I V E M ED IA

functions as a 'validation for myself' by discovering analogues of its

editor's situation in other women, by appropriating repressive elements
of her native culture and by providing her with a platform to develop her
own identity alongside these and to proclaim it to whomever might wish
to listen. It makes visible what in her native culture would remain invisi-
ble: 'This is my personal experience, but I know I'm not the only one
who's had it. This is my chance to slap people back and say, "I'm not your
fucking geisha!".' Bamboo Girl, like so many other labels of self-identified
marginal groups ('queer'), appropriates a term of marginalization, of
oppressive discourse, as power: the cover of the zine depicts a Filipina
wielding a bamboo stick as a weapon.
Aaron Cometbus's self-titled zine Cometbus takes self-valorization fur-
ther. He does not seek to affirm his own identity through the appropria-
tion of cultural signs and relations, nor does he accumulate the life
histories and struggles of other 'like-minded' individuals. Instead he pre-
sents narratives from his life written as self-contained short stories. They
appear as fictional first-person narratives, not as diary entries. The imme-
diacy of the narratives is reinforced by their presentation - the absence of
illustrations save on the cover forces the reader to focus on the text alone,
a text that is hand-written in neat capitals throughout. There are no page
breaks between the stories: should one finish part-way down a page, the
next continues directly under it. There is little sense of stories inhabiting
a particular period of history; they might just as easily have taken place
last week or a decade earlier. There is a feeling that they are all equally
distant, yet all still active as parts of an index of Aaron's identity. Stories
tumble one after the other: the storyteller cannot be stopped until his
fund is exhausted. Readers have written to him questioning the factual
nature of the stories: 'Stop asking me if the stories are true! Of course
they are true' (Cometbus, 45, no date, unpaginated). The stories locate
Aaron's self-identity in a social world that is picaresque; they recount his
travels across America, in milieux both familiar and alien; at local 'hip'
parties and in distant redneck bars. The stories are mundane: meaning-
less, eventless meetings and liaisons. Aaron appears to do nothing, yet his
stories are vivid with his experiences and ideas. They speak of dislocation
and not belonging, and seek those who are able to belong, though they
may be as isolated as he:

Beautiful girl at the stupid bar show in some other town, you could save me.
You've got mystery and charm, style and form, a strength of character that
says you know yourself well and don't notice me at all. You've got a certain
something that stands out in a crowd. It says, 'I don't fit in,' while mine says
'I don't belong.' Girl, I need to know, how could you be so out of place at
this place and still act like you own it? ('BGATSBSISOT', Cometbus, 45)
 W H AT USE I S A Z I N E? 63

On occasion we get a sense of what it means to Aaron to 'fit in', however

temporarily, and to feel comfortable with his own identity and his
own ideas:

Corey and I had stopped by on a whim, a chance to wind down after a stress-
ful rehearsal. Much to my surprise, I was drawn in to a discussion of obsessive-
compulsive disorders. Instead of hiding shyly in the corner or wasting time
with small talk, I found myself speaking my mind about what's on it ninety-
nine percent of the time. After all these years I'd finally come to the right
party. ('Control,' Cometbus, 45)

It is such 'experiences and ideas which are "nothing at all" to the domi-
nant society, whether because they are too regular, or too far outside
what is regular, that zines report and communicate' (Duncombe, 1997:
25-26). Such stories appear as both diaries and reportage; eyewitness
reports of a personal life, sharing a private life with strangers. As Burt
finds, Cometbus - and hundreds of zines like it - is journalistic (that is,
to do with private journals), yet it is hardly journalism. 4 Janice Radway
observes how 'the shift to professional production [of novels] has
reduced self-storytelling substantially' (Radway, 1984/1991: 45). This is
in large part due to the cultural and social distance that has been placed
between writers, publishers and readers. Zines have reduced this distance
perhaps better than any other alternative media, since their focus is on
the personal, and personal narrative above all. Zine culture collapses
Radway's three categories of cultural activity into one and with it has
re-emerged - albeit in a small-scale, artisanal, and 'anti-mass' field of pro-
duction - self-storytelling. Unlike Radway's romance readers, who 'are
not attending to stories they themselves have created to interpret their
own experiences' (ibid.: 49; emphasis in original), Aaron is his own
storyteller, publishing accounts that interpret his own experiences. He is
also producing and distributing them in a search for identity and socia-
bility, self-valorization and dialogue. His self-storytelling is not only
about him creating stories from himself, he is creating them in order to
(re)create and (re)present himself in them. He is his own narrator of his
everyday life.
Zines such as Cometbus can be considered as instances of popular pro-
duction rooted in the specificities of everyday life, whose authors - as
active agents - (as McRobbie, 1992 argues) project their sense of self
onto cultural practices. They represent their own quotidian experiences,
producing their own lives as a work (Lefebvre, 1947/1991). Through this
they produce difference and from that difference (as Stuart Hall, 1990
reminds us) corne social identity and social relations. Production and
sociation are together wrought from everyday experience through what
64 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

Fiske (1992c: 165) calls the 'bottom-up production of difference', created

by the popular producer from the available technological resources of the
dominant order, resources that tend to be used to create top-down media
products that minimize or even discourage participation amongst their
consumers. The dominant political economy that deploys these resources
and that ensures their possession and control by media elites is here con-
fronted by the development of a popular political economy of the media
that opposes institutionalization, professionalization and capitalization.
The zine is thus able to liberate its producer(s) from the controls and
limits set by the dominant order by redeploying its resources in radical,
infractory ways. In de Certeau's (1984) terms, the place that is the politi-
cal economy and the site of production of the mass media is inhabited by
those people normally outside such a place. As they practise media pro-
duction within this place they establish their own spaces: the space that
is the zine might be considered as an instance of de Certeau's 'practiced
place', an exemplar of alternative media production as a set of practices
embedded in everyday life.
The social world of Cometbus, despite its centrality for Aaron, is not a
world which we as readers are invited to enter, to participate in, in which
to locate our own identities. But the journal style is employed in some
zines precisely to encourage readers to share in a social world from which
they are distant. A sustained and complex account of this social world
presents itself in Pilgrims, dedicated to the music of the progressive rock
group Van Der Graaf Generator and its founder Peter Hammill. Though
nominally a fanzine, editor Fred Tomsett's 'tour diaries' function in simi-
lar fashion to the perzine accounts of Aaron Cometbus. His diaries tell us
much about a type of relationship between fan and musician in the con-
temporary progressive rock milieu. Tomsett is an inveterate touring fan
who publishes accounts of all the tours (and single concerts) he attends.
Here I will focus on one: Peter Hammill's 1998 European tour,
recounted by Tomsett over 15 pages in Pilgrims 39 (representing two-
thirds of that issue). He begins his account by situating himself in his own
social world. A hired van, sharing the trip with a fellow English fan,
breakdowns, bad weather, poor food at motorway service stations: all
emphasize the banality of the situation. Such quotidian detail is present
throughout the account: tales of one-way systems in European cities; dif-
ficulties in finding venues and hotels; traffic hold-ups and breakdowns. A
sizeable chunk of the diary is taken up with pre- and post-gig events that
have little bearing on the artist or the music, save perhaps to underscore
the writer's dedication to his subject (though I doubt that this is done
deliberately). Upon arriving at a venue Tomsett has expectations that
speak to a sustained set of relationships with fans a continent apart: he
 W HAT USE I S A Z I N E? 65

names fans from other countries (sometimes not even the country in
which he is) who he expects to turn up at the gig. He observes 'the same
people you see at most of these Dutch shows' and sees 'more regulars
here tonight: Adrian and Daniel from Switzerland'; the 'most notable
absentee was our pal from Grenoble'; 'we hit the cafe for food and run
into Dagmar'.
The two social worlds of the fanzine and the gig sustain each other and
the relationships between fans. Pilgrims can be understood as maintain-
ing those relationships during 'dead times' - as well as opening up the
social experience to the (majority of) readers unable to make the gigs.
These readers are also able to get close to Hammill himself: Tomsett has
developed a close relationship with the musician over the years, in part
due to his merchandize stall (the production and distribution of
Hammill's work is resolutely artisanal), his promotional activity through
Pilgrims and his almost-continuous presence at gigs. Readers participate
in what Thompson (1995: 219) terms 'non-reciprocal intimacy at a dis-
tance', though in this instance they are enjoying the fruits of a more or
less intimate relationship enjoyed by the editor of the fanzine with the
musician. We might compare this non-reciprocity between reader and
subject with the relationship between reader and subject of Bamboo Girl
(i.e. its editor): 'Sabrina' projects her constructed self out to a potential
readership and invites them to become intimate with her through the
medium of the zine.
The American music zine MAXIMUMROCKNROLL is less interested in
providing a vicarious social world centred on performers for its readers.
One of its aims (pace Duncombe) is instrumental: to help create the con-
ditions where marginal musics (in its case, hardcore punk) may flourish:
'helping to connect things internationally. Creating links all over the
place' (Tim Yohannon, late editor of MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, cited in
Turner, 1995: 191). It not only provides thorough coverage of the
hundreds of tiny, group-owned independent labels as well as coverage of
the groups' gigs and interviews with their members, it also seeks to
encourage a network of self-sufficient fans and musicians (as with zine
editors and readers, often the same people who will work together to put
on gigs, arrange tours for one another and organize local distribution
throughout the world). It has published a country-by-country directory of
groups, venues, labels and individuals interested and willing to work with
others to get their music heard, along with those willing to provide board
and lodgings for travelling groups. It also lists sympathetic radio stations,
record and book shops and zines. The title reflects its emphasis on self-
organization and the urgency and power entailed by doing it yourself:
Book Your Own Fuckin' Life. Yohannon attests to its success:
66 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

For instance, there's a kid [who] [j]ust through pen-paling [sic] and whatever-
I mean his band isn't even on a label, he's just put out his own releases, a cou-
pIe of singles and an LP - his band has gone to Japan twice, just left now for a
tour of Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan again. (ibid.)

Instrumentality - at least in the sense of a search for personal contacts,

opportunities for travel and performance, for the acquisition of goods -
is not restricted to punk culture. In his extensive series of interviews with
other zine editors, Erik Farseth (editor of Paper Scissors Clocks) reveals
this again and again. Sarah Lorimer (editor of two zines: Baby I Dig You
and Pinto) suggests that her motives for publishing encompass both the
publicizing of the personal and a range of instrumental ends:

Why do it? 'Exhibitionism, maybe. Doing zines has gotten me as much read-
ing material as I can get through, many friends, a boyfriend or two, a place
to live in a new city, and into graduate school.' (Farseth, 1998: 45)

'Yoonie' (another two-zine editor) trusts the zine community to provide

her with accommodation:

The zine community IS very SAFE. I could just say 'I need someplace to stay
in this city' and find a guy who does a zine there, through a friend or some-
thing, and you know you have somewhere safe to stay. (Farseth, 1998: 55;
emphasis in original)

Like last summer I built up an entire summer vacation going up-and-down

the East Coast based on meeting people who I'd written to for years, and
read their zines, and really respected them and wanted to meet them. And
that's different than just having a pen pal. (ibid.: 64)

Never do such achievements displace what appears to be the central fea-

ture of this personal odyssey: the need to communicate with others, how-
ever few, however distant. Not to meet people is to consider oneself a
social failure. For John Porcellino, editor of King Cat Comics, the social
failure came from social pressures during his schooldays; his zines
changed all that:

when I did my own zines I found out that even though I was pathologically
shy and mostly (I assumed) hated by my peers (i.e., Suburban H[igh] S[chool]
kids) and an absolutely ill fitting freak - I found that, through zines, I could
have friends - and that I could communicate and develop relationships with
people just as frustrated, lonely and lost as me. It changed my whole life.
(Farseth, 1998: 45)

'Paul', erstwhile editor of Hippycore, sums up this function well enough

when he talks of zines as 'prosthetics for these distant relationships' (cited
in Rutherford, 1992: 5).
 WHAT USE IS A ZINE? 67

Zines and Communication

The zine as a medium can be thought of as monological in practice yet

dialogical in intent. Whilst its structure suggests other monological
periodicals such as magazines and newspapers, it contains a powerful
mechanism for enabling communication between individuals. Much zine
writing might be construed as a kind of letter-writing. Whilst the pro-
ducer does not require a direct and immediate response, the notion of
zine culture will prompt dialogue far better than the daily newspaper or
any mainstream magazine. The letter-writers (readers) of the latter are an
elite in the pages of the periodical; their membership subject to criteria
such as 'readability', concision and relevance. In zine culture, anyone may
write letters to anyone; whether they are published is hardly the point;
some may wish to present their letters as a zine of their own. Here
perhaps is an example of a fusion of John B. Thompson's (1995: 82.f£)
mediated interaction and mediated quasi-interaction.
Zines producers and readers do not simply use the object of their writ-
ing and reading as symbolic capital with which to communicate to others,
as in Radway's romance reading groups. Zines are created precisely for
people to communicate through them - they are multiple objects created
by different producers to reflect and construct a complex of social reali-
ties. There is an emphasis on the act over the result, at least to the degree
that success is not to be measured by quantity of responses or circulation.
The British songwriter Momus recasts Andy Warhol's statement on fame
for zines and other micro-cultural forms: 'In the future everyone will be
famous for fifteen people' (cited in Burt, 1999: 171). For Radway's
romance readers the possibility of the social lies outside the text; within
zine culture sociality takes place primarily within and across texts - social
performance is enacted within the pages of the zine. Acts of writing, acts
of publication, acts of dialogue and exchange and intertextuality are
essentially linked with sociality; the intersubjective is realized through the
intertextual: '''meeting people" ... is a key aspect of zines' (Duncombe,
1997: 17) - especially 'prosthetic' meetings.
Zine publishing stands in for meeting people: it can be explained as an
instance of material culture that instantiates lived experience, a set of
social relations. At the same time it presents an individual's declaration
and construction of self-identity and invites others to engage in a dia-
logue about that identity. By embodying one's own history, experience
and opinions within a publication (however narrowly published) one is
'authorizing' oneself to speak, validating one's life, making public one's
voice - at least the parts of one's voice that otherwise would not get
68 A LT ERN AT I V E M ED I A

heard. We might think of these voices as constructing what Castells

(1997: 8) has termed 'resistance identity', that is, identity constructed by
social actors who find themselves marginalized, devalued or stigmatized
by dominant forces in society and culture. These actors then produce
'communes, or communities' as expressions of 'the exclusion of the
excluders by the excluded' (1997: 9). In the case of zine culture the
remaking of the social world takes place primarily through symbolic pro-
duction, not in spite of it or as an adjunct to other social activities;
Thompson (1995: 35) argues that 'we feel ourselves to belong to groups
and communities which are constituted in part through the media'. In the
case of zines, it seems that for many those social formations are consti-
tuted wholly through the media. Earlier I found Cheryl Zobel's three-
part definition ('self-edited, self-financed and self-published') too general.
Perhaps her definition, with its mantric 'self' permeating all stages of the
making of zine culture, comes closer than we first thought.

Zine Culture and E-zines

Is it possible to identify an e-zine culture as distinct as that surrounding the

printed zine? There is evidence to suggest that the e-zine is not an equal
replacement for its printed precursor. When the editor of For the Clerisy
moved his zine to the Internet he found that he not only lost readers who
lacked access to the Internet, but he lost readers who preferred the tactile
and portable nature of the printed publication. The editor of the Angry
Thoreaun concurred: 'having to sit at a desk and read it takes all the fun
out of it'. After a few issues of the Clerisy e-zine, readership had dropped
so low that it returned to print. Here we see the rehearsal of common
arguments about portability and physicality familiar from any champion
of the printed page. The Internet might well be a useful distribution
mechanism for information, but it is ill-suited as a reading mechanism for
discursive texts. Text can always be printed off, but this act results in a set
of uniform pages, printed on one side only, that bear little similarity to the
variety of formats that the printed zine can offer. 5 Further, if the zine is a
physical token, an exchange mechanism for a social relationship, what
precisely is being exchanged when it turns electronic? E-zines mostly
appear as poor simulacra of the printed original. The imagination and
experimentation in layout and design that are so common amongst
printed zines are largely absent. What is also absent is the notion of zine
etiquette, to be replaced by the generalities of 'netiquette'. Whilst this may
 W HAT USE I S A Z I N E ? 69

not seem an irreparable loss, it removes at least one set of defining social
relations from zine culture and moves the enterprise that bit closer to the
mainstream. Its ways of 'doing business' (I use the term guardedly - hardly
any zinester would consider their endeavours as a business) become less
distinguishable from the dominant practices in cyberspace. What, apart
from content, is there to set the e-zine apart from other forms of communi-
cation in cyberspace?
In his study of comic e-zines, Matthew J. Smith (1999) identifies two
strategies for building communities in cyberspace: presentation and invi-
tation. 'Presentation' has to do with demonstrating knowledge and exper-
tize within the e-zine, valorizing the non-professionalized voices of editors
and writers. 'Invitation' is founded on the principle of the active partici-
pation of these non-professionals in the writing, creation and production
of the e-zine. Neither, as we know, is unique to the e-zine - printed zines,
fanzines and most manifestations of alternative media beyond fandom dis-
play these two strategies. Though the technical manifestations of the
strategies may have changed (the use of email.forinstance.to 'publish'
one's opinions on an e-zine's discussion list), the strategies are far from
new or unique to the medium. In what follows I shall examine a sample
of e-zines in more detail. First, though, we must identify such publications.
To do so I have used the on-line equivalent of the paper-based networking
and review zines. How are e-zines collected and organized by these 'meta-
e-zines', and how do they compare with printed zines?6

Towards Cases: the etext archives

and labowitz's e-zine list

The 240 e-zines collected (at January 2000) in The Etext Archives
(http://www.etext.orglindex.shtml) are all text-based; illustrative material
is generated by the ASCII character set. These e-zines are so formatted
since they are mailed out to subscribers. They seek to replicate a printed
publication in terms of its movement from producer to reader and in
terms of its form (though the ASCII e-zine is far more limited in its visual
presentation than even the most 'primitive' hand-written zine will be;
visually the collection is undifferentiated). When zines move to the Web
and not only make use of more sophisticated graphics (through scanning
or importing) but add audio and video files to pages, each e-zine becomes
more distinctive. (Arguably these multimedia publications require a cate-
gory separate from 'zine' to accommodate them. For the present purpose,
70 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

however, I shall consider them all as zines since they continue to be

centred on text. Furthermore, my argument in this chapter is interested
in processes of communication, identity formation and sociality rather
than in formats and features.)
John Labowitz's archive of web-based e-zines (http://www.meer.
net/.......johnlle-zine-list/) is considered 'probably the most comprehensive
list available on the Internet' by the editors of The Etext Archives (at
January 2000 it contained 4,225 zines).? Of these, relatively few seem to
accord with the principles and interests of the printed zines we have
already encountered. By contrast, the majority are primarily interested in
'product' and promoting that product. Labowitz has exploded the notion
of zine to encompass so many categories as to make the term meaning-
less: in his list we find career newsletters, advice bulletins for small busi-
nesses' web sites for regional and city radio stations in the us. The list
can be searched by title or by keyword: of the 80 most-cited keywords,
the 'top five' subject headings are poetry (with 460 occurrences), business
(441), music (399), marketing (386) and humour (378). The poetry and
music e-zines resemble their print analogues in all their diversity: the for-
mer focusing on amateur poetry, most often comprising e-zines written
by a single poet; the latter ranging across the various genres and sub-gen-
res of popular and classical music (mainstream and 'alternative'). In the
world of the printed zine, we might expect those concerned with business
and marketing to be critiques of dominant economic practices (such as
Adbusters~ Corporate Watch and any of the hundreds of radical environ-
mental and anarchist zines). Labowitz's list exclusively comprises
'business-positive' publications, mostly guides for small (often one-
person) businesses.
Yet Labowitz's definition of e-zine as presented on his web site contains
elements familiar to us from the culture of printed zines. E-zines are 'gen-
erally produced by one person or a small group of people, done often for
fun or personal reasons, and tend to be irreverent, bizarre and/or eso-
teric'. Of the e-zines searchable through his 'top five' keywords, very few
fit all of these categories. He does admit that the term 'has been co-opted
by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any type of pub-
lication distributed electronically', but nowhere does he suggest - as
seems to be the case - that the majority of e-zines in his list fit better with
this latter, co-opted definition. (A further attempt at defining the web
zine, hardly fares better: 'a persistent online location for extended writ-
ing that is posted periodically'; Locke, no date.) An attempt to find
e-perzines similar to those discussed earlier retrieves 74 titles indexed by
the keyword 'personal'. These are remarkably diverse, including web sites
on handwriting analysis, 'personal computing experiences' (!), personal
 WHAT USE IS A ZINE? 71

taxation, health and beauty, and 'personal success' - examples of what

Wilson (1999) has termed 'niche-casting'. Amongst them I was able to
find only four titles that suggest an outlook and a rationale similar to
their print analogues. 8

E-zine Cases

The title page of Amy Funaro's Starache (http://www.geocities.com/

Wellesley/Garden/2600/) gives her snail-mail postal address prominently,
and other clues in her pages (such as information on the availability of
back issues) suggest that her web site is primarily intended as publicity for
her 'real' zine, which she continues to produce in printed form. What we
have on-line appear to be textual extracts from that zine, within which
we encounter a voice similar to the perzines we have already met:

I can't stop doing zines. I'm addicted, I suppose. I guess maybe it's my way
of still doing something. I don't want to change the world anymore. But
I still want to do something, to let me know I'm still alive and this is it.
('An explanation of my past "riot grrrl" articles', Starache web site;
http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/Garden/2600/explain.html)

Amy presents essays on her shyness, on women and music, her 'riot grrri
past' and a selection of her poetry. Her site is supported by advertise-
ments, a common feature of e-zines of all stripes. Starache on-line
appears incomplete; knowing that there is a printed version available and
seeing only text leaves us with an e-zine that is basically a signpost - there
is little of the socially communicative force behind what is essentially an
advertisement for a printed zine. Similarly, whilst the quiet, understated
accounts of the editor's daily life that make up the e-perzine Kickbright
(http://kickbright.com/) call for 'interaction', they hardly seem to need it.
Existing only on the Web, the zine makes limited use of hypertext links,
and seems satisfied in quietly proclaiming its editor's own interest
(mostly US 'indie' bands).
Save for its first issue, which had a print run of one (and, according to
its editor, was read by 'about seven people'), Diba, Diva? (http://www.
geocities.com/ryaneza/) has existed since early 1996 as an e-zine, due to
its editor's avowed enthusiasm for computers. It too is supported by
advertisements and contains an archive of the e-zine as well as a separate
daily journal called Piglet. Its editor (Richard Francis Yaneza) is unabashed
about his e-zine's subject: 'You've probably noticed that I just like to
72 A LT ERN AT I V E M ED I A

babble on and on. And that's precisely what "Diba, Diva?" is: me babbling'
(http://www.geocities.com/ryaneza/about.html).
Yaneza's e-zine does not behave like the ASCII e-zines of The Etext
Archives: when it is updated ('every two weeks or so') readers can expect
the entire site to change. Yaneza makes use of storage conventions now
commonplace in cyberspace (the archive) at the same time as he takes
advantage of the unfixedness, floating and multiple approaches to
authoring that the Web can bring. Whilst the traditionalist zine editor
might balk at an e-zine that dispenses with periodicity and becomes
essentially unstable, is this anything more than extending the already
fluid boundaries of zine publishing, where frequency is a moveable feast,
and format and layout are the outcomes of a meeting between creative
thought and available materials? Yanzena's apparently cavalier approach
has at its heart an interest in exploring form and presentation no less
drastic than numerous printed zines.
My last example takes us where the mundane becomes the raw mate-
rial for cultural production by an 'ordinary person' to a significantly
greater extent than even the personal stories of Aaron Cometbus (which,
in the end, have a literary flair). For this reason I make no apology for
examining it in some detail. What I now focus on is a personal web site
that gives full flight to the banal as its subject matter. The Big
DumpTruck! (www.bigdumptruck.com/. subtitled 'Throwing Little
Thought Pebbles at Your Windshield') is produced by Jody LaFerriere, a
suburban office worker, mother and resident of Massachusetts. The
following gives some indication of the type and style of content found
on Jody's site:

1 'My Favorite Xmas Music': this includes albums by the Carpenters,

John Denver and the Muppets, Johnny Mathis and 'A Charlie Brown
Christmas' ('These are the ones I listen to year after year'). She
encourages visitors to her site to 'have fun with Amazon. Enter
"Christmas" as your search term and see what you get!' (from
http://www.bigdumptruck.com/xmas.htm at 1 November 2000).
2 Jody's list of 'Famous People Who Have a First Name for a Last
Name' which at 1 November 2000 comprised around 400 entries,
including Woody Allen, Klaus Barbie (!), Eric Carmen, Joseph
Conrad, Martin Denny, Philip K. Dick, Dean Martin, Diana Ross and
Mary Shelley (from http://www.bigdumptruck.com/lists/).
3 An account of her brief meeting with American TV Food Network
chef Emeril Lagasse at a book signing: 'He made the spinach salad
with potatoes, onions and bacon from the Christmas book. I wish I
had been able to taste it, because it smelled unbelievable. He didn't
really pass it around to anyone, and by the time he was done he went
 W HAT USE I 5 A Z I N E? 73

to sign books so I didn't really see what happened to it' (from

http://www.bigdumptruck.com/emeril/).

Jody uses the products of capitalism to create both her own mundane
cultural forms and her means of communication - the decapitalization in
the hand-written or photocopied fanzine is not to be found here; per-
sonal Internet connectivity, as we know, remains largely the province of
the affluent, white middle class. In both her choice of cultural products
and her choice of medium Jody is resolutely suburban. Doubly then, her
activities will tend to be overlooked by academics who insist on or look
for resistance and infraction in everyday cultural production (as does
John Fiske) or who regard popular (civic) use of the Internet narrowly as
a tool for political empowerment within marginalized communities (such
as Mele, 1999). Yet, following de Certeau, may we not argue that 'mar-
ginality is becoming universal' (1984: xvii), at least in the sense that there
is a majority of non-producers of culture? Jody is surely part of that silent
majority who have become hidden from most studies of everyday cultural
production by slipping through what we might think of as the standard
'grids of disempowerment' formed by the intersection of such essentializ-
ing categories as gender, age, class and race.
In part this might be because Jody's activities represent an uncomfort-
able accommodation with capitalism. Her consumption tends to the spec-
tacular (her site contains many images of the products she adores: CD
sleeves, Emeril Lagasse book covers), she unashamedly (and for her
unproblematically) advertizes amazon.com on her site ('Please support
The Big DumpTruck! by using this link when you purchase books, videos
and popular music from amazon.com). Her site has been designed by a
Massachusetts company, Aeropub Communications, which shares the
copyright in the site and to whom requests to advertise on Jody's site
must be addressed. Not only do we find the deployment of professional
skills and reliance on an institution (in the employment of a web consul-
tancy firm); capitalization is sought too. Much zine culture treats adver-
tising with suspicion and scepticism, believing it to be a mechanism for
the compromise, dilution and 'recuperation' of the radical. Jody has even
had designed Big DumpTruck! mugs and mouse mats. Her activities force
us to reassess the claims made by Jay Hamilton regarding deprofession-
alization, decapitalization and deinstitutionalization as imperatives of
alternative media. Such practices as Jody's alert us to the problematic of
'purity' in alternative media practices (Atton, 2000), a theme I return to
in Chapter 6. Whilst these three features may be eroded, there remains
much in Jody's web site that might be considered alternative: at the very
least, that she is giving voice to her own cultural expression through a
74 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

publishing medium over which she, and not an elite group, has control.
She enacts a selection of texts rather than an interpretation of them - her
choices are closer to 'top tens', there is little evidence of their being trans-
formed into a new cultural form. What they do become, though, is com-
municated - and they themselves are the vehicles for communication.
lody does not just want to share her tastes with others, she wants others
to use them to communicate with her - to embellish them, to embroider
the mundane with more mundanity (how long does a list of people with
a last name for a first name have to be? Answer: as long as lody wants it
to be.) What do the texts she selects signify? Do they not stand as tokens
for sociality? They do not simply proclaim lody's tastes, they reach out
to seek others who share her tastes and who will valorize them by con-
tributing similarly to her web site. What is at stake here is the power of
these texts as socially centred signs for intersubjective communication -
lody's tastes are perhaps marginal after all, at least marginal in her neigh-
bourhood. So she looks more widely for a community. The texts then
become socially relevant (regardless of any qualitative value they may
have to either lody or her virtual community). Are lody's activities per-
haps 'therapeutics for deteriorating social relations' in suburban life (de
Certeau, 1984: xxiv)?
Need this absence of interpretative significance in the site worry us? In
the case of her favourite Christmas music lody's texts are not there for
appreciation, criticism or discussion - they are there as symbols of her taste.
Unlike a fanzine, we are not taken into lody's musical experience, what
such experiences mean to her, how they explicitly contribute to her iden-
tity. What she does tell us, is how to purchase them - she links each item
to its stock record at amazon.com. These are strong recommendations: we
are urged to trust her and to buy them. lody's version of 'networks in the
everyday' constitutes readers and contributors but also reaches out to the
commercial world - the immediacy and proximity enabled by the practice
of hyperlinking compresses these two networks further. While the space
produced by lody is reappropriated from the dominant value system, her
choices of texts are largely untransformed - the societal space she produces
is organized to a significant degree according to the dominant value system.
This is not to find in lody's web site a resistive, Fiskean power of what we
might call 'progressive consumption'. Instead we have the expression of
the everyday as Andrew l. Weigert (1981: 36) has described it, as 'a taken-
for-granted reality which provides the unquestioned background of mean-
ing for each person's life'. From this expression proceeds her desire to
share her mundane humour and the foci of her preferred popular culture
(the Carpenters, Emeril Lagasse) with anyone with whom her mundane
tastes, opinions and experiences resonate.
 W HAT USE I S A Z I N E? 75

It is difficult to consider lody's site as a zine on the principles we have

already discussed. lody appears as a consumer of mainstream culture.
Castell's 'exclusion of the excluders by the excluded' is quite absent from
this style of e-zine. Mainstream popular culture is embraced; not only
that, Jody and her interests are more likely to be the objects of scorn and
contempt within a zine such as Bamboo Girl than to be seen as a pro-
gression of zine values and culture. Is this the final co-optation of zine
culture - its immersion and implementation by 'the majority'? Perhaps
what lody is achieving with her site is less a progression from the zine and
more to do with the extension of the concept of the web site and the use
of email. lody's producerly, cultural activities are concerned with the
commonplace, the trite, even the dull. lody is 'breaking out' very differ-
ently from our zine editors - taking with her the desires and pleasures of
the mainstream, of the unabashedly popular, simply hoping to embrace
them in the virtual company of like-minded others. There is little radical
here, nothing infractory or antagonistic. On the other hand we might
find her 'liberation' in a valorization of the everyday that perhaps exceeds
even that found in Cometbus. Jody's interests are in classification, in the
ordering of the mundane. Her activities tend to the repetitious. Of course
her self-publishing is far from revolutionary in content, but it might be
that in re-presenting her massified tastes and quotidian humour as spe-
cial, as particular to her, she is producing herself differently, constructing
her everyday experience as her identity just as certainly as we have seen
Sabrina and Aaron do in their zines.
Does it make sense to talk of zines in cyberspace? Whilst zines persist
(and show no signs of disappearing) in printed form and continue to sup-
port a definable zine culture around them (however diffuse), in cyber-
space it is difficult to separate e-zines 'proper' from other forms of
'personal publishing'. Shorn of their marginality in cyberspace, subject to
the equalizing force of the search engine (whether to make them equally
visible or equally invisible), the e-zine appears less distinct, its culture
more amorphous. Of course, the printed zine was already a simulacrum
for face-to-face communication, already a symbol for social relations. Yet
the boundaries that such physical objects provide - with their limits on
print runs, interactions with copy shops and printers (I mean the human
version not the machine), the physical necessity of circulating them, the
reliance on other physical publications such as review zines to help move
them around - meant that their production and promotion took up
measured space in the world. The various types of synchronous and asyn-
chronous computer-mediated communication such as chat rooms, news-
groups, MUDs and MOOs, discussion lists, emails and web pages - and
their multiple use at single sites - take away any notion of physicality.
76 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

Significantly, though, they offer new opportunities for sociality that are
arguably more immediate than those found in printed zine culture.
Without wishing to go down the Baudrillardian road of hyperreality
and the extreme fracturing of subjectivities and identities, cyberspace has
clearly opened up combinations of communicative activity but with them
the possibilities for fragmentation. Does original expression become lost
as we construct our identity from the fragments of others' sites, continu-
ally rebuilding ourselves, reinventing our sociality, just as the Web is con-
tinually in flux? As we produce more and more 'text', and add more
multimedia fragments to it, do we come to enunciate less and fall back
into an interior monologue? The more we engage in 'performativity
without consequence', Roger Silverstone (1999: 77) has argued, 'the
more we may find ourselves alone' in cyberspace. More prosaically, a rad-
ical employment of hyperlinking can result in the editorial 'glue' of a
publication becoming so weak that readers move away from a site so
thoroughly that they forget their starting point. For a zine that hopes to
call out to others from a fixed point, from a single individual's point of
view, such fragmentation is anathema. This might explain the relatively
conservative use of hyperlinking by e-zines such as Starache and Diba,
Diva? - their links mostly keep the reader within the site, the better to
emphasize the compactness and identity of the site with its author.
This is not to deny either medium the possibility for developing and
maintaining relationships that are supportive and intimate: Wellman and
Gulia (1999: 186) have argued convincingly that relationships in cyber-
space 'are much like most of the ones [people] develop in their real life:
intermittent, specialized and varying in strength' - the same appears to be
true for those relationships developed through (printed) zine culture.
Wellman and Gulia go further, claiming that relationships in cyberspace
might even reverse the trend of the privatization of public spaces, pro-
moting community and social trust amongst participants who lack these
in their everyday, lived experience. In the first instance, though, what
the printed zine and the e-zine have in common is that they are both
'prosthetics', substitutes for sociality. Most writing about the Internet
considers distance as a spatial or temporal concept that can be reduced
across electronic networks. In the case of the e-zine the reduction of
social distance does not merely enable isolated or separated individuals to
communicate with one another, it appears to reduce the barriers to
sociality itself. It enables the personal, the intimate experiences and
accounts to be collapsed into a form of sociation that structures on-line
publishing as more than a simple alternative to the mass media and one
that is determinedly not designed for mass appeal. The massification of
most mainstream attempts at on-line publishing and more generally on-line
 W HAT USE I S A Z I N E? 77

transactions (such as e-commerce) relies on the Internet's power to

diminish physical distance. Alternative on-line publishing employs tech-
nology to reduce social distance, to enable the personal and the interper-
sonal, even to erase the notion of audience or readership.
The zine (printed and electronic) and its productive context also have
the capacity to reduce cultural distance: the everyday conditions of pro-
duction and the everyday experiences from which the zine is created
break down the classic aesthetic barriers we see erected in high-art value
systems between cultural activity and everyday life. High cultural capital
and educational capital, along with economic capital, are not required.
Further, the zine requires the elision of cultural activity and everyday life:
the stuff of the latter informs the content and the processes of the former.
Anyone can produce a zine, anyone can read one, goes the philosophy of
the zinester: there are few barriers to participation at any level. With the
e-zine, cultural distance between the reader and the publication (and its
author) is reduced further by erasure of the physical object. For some zine
commentators the late 1990s saw the 'death of the zine' (Marr, 1999;
Yorke, 2000). They argued that the distinctiveness of zine culture (as a
print-based culture, centred on the non-professional, single-editor work-
ing within a community of other similar producers) was being eroded by
bandwagon-jumpers, corporate co-optation and zinesters interested in
publishing only as a fashion statement. They also acknowledge that
zinesters (the majority of whom are, to judge from Stephen Duncombe's
survey, in their teens or early twenties) grow up, take on new responsi-
bilities (careers, families), find it more difficult to find time and money to
devote to what might appear an increasingly futile activity (being famous
for a mere 15 people). What such pessimism allows little room for is the
erosion of the notion of 'zine culture' in a more positive direction: doing
away with the elitism surrounding much zine activity. Mter all, the recent
history of zine publishing is to be found in the 'copy culture' arising
from punk, a set of cultural practices quite alien to people like ]ody. Such
practices were simply not available to her; they were those of an elite
(however marginalized they deemed themselves to be, they were not
without power). In his exploration of what it means to speak of a culture
of everyday life, John Fiske refers to the

weaving of one's own richly textured life within the constraints of economic
deprivation and experience ... of controlling some of the conditions of social
existence [and] of constructing, and therefore exerting some control over,
social identities and social relations. (Fiske, 1992c: 160)

Fiske is interested not in people who through their actions and activities
proclaim themselves to be part of a subculture (such as Aaron and
78 A LT ERN A T IV E M ED IA

Sabrina); he does not even appear to be interested in people like lody.

Even though she is creating a personal media space woven into her every-
day activities, this is hardly equivalent to the resistance that Fiske con-
siders the result of incorporating capitalist resources into everyday
culture. lody creates her own texts through far more subdued means than
the cultural 'guerrillas' whom Fiske champions: 'evading hegemonic cap-
ture' (Fiske, 1989/1991: 137) could not be further from her agenda. lody
is perhaps erasing the vestiges of cultural distinction that accrue to zine
publishing by producing her own zine-like publication in ignorance of
zine-cultural history. She encounters not an already-existent subculture
but a dominant, technologized culture that suggests to her ways of self-
valorization not open to her previously. By diminishing social and cul-
tural distance such media practices are able to access the specificities of
the everyday lives - their meanings, practices and values - of individuals
sociated in 'occasional communities'.

Notes

1. Jary, Horne and Bucke are careful not to hitch all football fanzines to the
subcultural wagon. They stress another category of fanzine that 'merely reflect[s]
the commitment to team and locale of ardent supporters' (1991: 584). It is diffi-
cult to construe such publications as subcultural equivalents of Hebdige's
fanzines.
2. This is a different form of gift relationship than that found by Kollock
amongst cyberspace communities, where the gift lies not in the exchange of a
publication, but in information, advice or help received.
3. Duncombe (1997: 55) finds that zine editors rarely talk in instrumental
terms; it is important to make a distinction between the zines discussed here and,
for example, the alternative media of new social movements. The latter certainly
share production characteristics of the zine and can also be understood in terms
of their ability to transform social relations. We might term them 'activist zines':
they were especially prominent amongst the anarchist community in the 1990s.
Zines and activist zines share an interest in the establishment of community, the
search for self- and group identity, and in the validation of personal experience
and culture, but activist zines tend to have explicit instrumental ends (raising con-
sciousness, mobilizing resources, campaigning and organizing, 'revolutionizing
the traditional order').
4. On-line journalling has itself become formalized as a practice on the Web.
The MetaJournals web site (http://www.metajournals.com/main.html) offers
tuition in setting up and maintaining an on-line journal, as well as providing
essays and discussion lists for on-line journallers to share their experiences.
5. Some zines, though, find an economic benefit in moving to the Internet. The
experimental music zine Rubberneck became an e-zine in 2000 after 15 years as
 W HAT USE I S A Z I N E? 79

a printed publication. Its editor always insisted on it being free of charge. To

achieve this he needed advertising revenue from the tiny independent record
labels whose releases he reviewed. When that dried up, he was unable to subsi-
dize the printed version himself. Moving to the Internet ensured the zine's con-
tinuance as a free publication and, whilst it required subsidy from its editor, at
least this meant less personal financial commitment than maintaining the print
version would have incurred. In correspondence to me he bemoaned the lack of
readers signing his guest book and was concerned that his readership would drop.
Yet he was prepared for this and to lose his own money in order to keep to his
principle of producing a free publication. John Marr (1999), editor of the zine
Murder Can Be Fun, believes that if he were starting a zine for the first time 'no
way would [he] mess with hard copy - [herd go straight to the net. It's cheaper,
easier, and faster.'
6. Defining and identifying e-zines are subject to the same problems we
encountered with printed zines. The same arguments about the differences
between fanzines, zines and niche publications apply, as do those surrounding the
co-optation of the term by various interests. We will see, however, that further
and more severe problems arise around the notion of e-zine.
7. Labowitz has since indicated his 'retiral' from maintaining the list and has
offered the list to any non-profit organization committed to its upkeep.
8. This is not to say that there do not exist others that do resemble printed
zines in these ways. Whilst many netsurfers would use Labowitz's list, many
others might well use more idiosyncratic means such as personal recommenda-
tion, review in a printed publication or linking to e-zines from other sites. I have
not attempted to replicate these types of searching here.
 ©w~n~IlJ~®
4
alternative media and new
social movements

now want to move from examinations of the personal and the

I individual in communities to broader sociopolitical applications of

alternative media. In this chapter and the next I explore some of the
ways in which the transformation of roles and responsibilities I have pro-
posed as a theoretical construct is developed in practice by contemporary
alternative media producers. I shall focus on the use of alternative media
by new social movements, in particular by the various groups, alliances
and pressure groups that comprise the contemporary, radical environ-
mentalist movement in the Britain of the 1990s. In the present chapter I
shall examine the aims of a range of alternative publications and explore
how these are variously realized through their approaches to organiza-
tion and production. The following chapter will look at the writers of
these publications. It will discover the extent to which readers are
enabled to contribute and the impact that radically democratic notions of
participation can have on the coherence and coverage of these publica-
tions and on the production of knowledge within new social movements.

The British New Social Movement

Media in the 1990s

The 1990s saw an upsurge in the alternative media that built on the 'zine
explosion' of the 1980s. A large proportion of these titles were linked
with environmental protest movements. The impetus for much of the
 NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 81

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. In his study of the involvement of anarchists in move-
ments for social change, Andy Chan observes that '[r]ecent years have
seen a considerable degree of intellectual traffic flowing both ways
between anarchism and environmentalism' (Chan, 1995: 48). Welsh and
McLeish's (1996) study of anarchism and road protest finds a high cor-
relation between the two. Anarchist commentators have pointed out the
anarchist contribution to new social movement activity.
Numerous publications have grown up around the various groups and
movements, documenting their actions as well as providing strategic and
tactical discussion, and theoretical and ideological debate. Many protests
and actions have spawned their own publications, such as the McLibel
Update (giving news of the libel action taken by McDonald's against two
activists), its on-line successor, McSpotlight (examined in Chapter 6) and
The Roadbreaker (the 'No MIl link road' campaign newsletter). Others
are published by specific groups engaged in a range of activities (for
instance, the radical environmental group Earth First!'s Do or Die).
Larger, less focused movements have established their own titles, such as
Pod and Scottish Anarchist. There are also many general, non-aligned
publications such as the free news-sheets Counter Information and
SchNEWS, as well as more substantial newspapers such as The Law and
Squall. A video magazine, Undercurrents, was also established: this aimed
to provide an activist-directed alternative to television news. It appears
that, just as a CIA report on the American underground press astutely
observed, 'the vitality of the "alternative press" [is] directly proportional
to the health of the radical movement in general' (from the CINs
'Situation Information Report: the Underground Press', quoted in Rips,
1981: 73). If the alternative press flourishes in tandem with the move-
ments it supports and documents, then in order to better understand the
role and nature of the alternative media, we need to look at the context
of these movements, which arises from what has been called the 'New
Protest'.
The New Protest describes a plethora of diverse groups and move-
ments that developed in the 1990s to espouse direct action to further
their causes. These coalesced and combined or split as choice or necessity
dictated; most are organizations without formal memberships, such as
Earth First!; or temporary formations that come together for specific
actions, such as the Earth Liberation Front and the radical cyclists' cam-
paign, Critical Mass. Others lead a shadowy existence in an attempt to
evade police surveillance, such as the militant animal rights group the
Justice Department. Most have no leaders, no hierarchy. Some employ
82 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

only non-violent direct-action tactics (NVOA) and are known as 'fluffies';

others do not balk at violence against property and sometimes people
('spikies'). Protests can take the form of marches, occupations (in tunnels,
in trees, on tripods), street parties, 'guerrilla squats', the setting up of ille-
gal sound systems. Locations are both urban and rural: protests may take
place in offices, factories, building sites, fields and on nature reserves. Yet
we should not consider these protests as entirely new phenomena: they
are, as George McKay suggests, 'the latest in the line of living, indeed
thriving, cultures of resistance, ones that offer their resistance through
direct action' (McKay, 1996: 158). Where, arguably, they are new is in
the nexus of alliances that have come together - animal rights, environ-
mentalism, anti-capitalist critiques, squatters' rights, rave culture - and in
the highly visible networks of communication and action that they have
developed.
McKay notes the employment of diverse tactics in protests: tunnelling,
tree-house building, demonstrations, occupations and 'celebration as a
struggle'. He helps us understand the multiple voices and ideas that offer
so many perspectives on the New Protest at the same time as they cohere
as a 'patchwork' into a larger sociopolitical phenomenon. Independent
self-creation is paramount, as is manifested by the practice of 'O.l.I: poli-
tics' (D.I. ~ Politics, 1996). The individuals and groups participating in
these movements do so from a position of non-alignment with political
parties and groupings. They usually operate singly or in temporary
alliances: what Richard Gott has termed the 'hit and run left' (Gott,
1995). The two major themes here - self-organization and 'DIY politics'
as 'channels of resistance', rather than the more traditional avenues of
political parties and organized pressure groups, and bricolage (as diver-
sity) as a strength 'deriv[ing] from the refusal to grant primacy to any par-
ticular site or mode of struggle' (Welsh and McLeish, 1996: 32) - are
useful starting points for an analysis of the contemporary alternative
media. The application of the first feature should be clear enough: it
points to media that are set up explicitly to fill gaps left by the mass
media, where the alternative media hold that the mass media have failed
to represent certain issues or social groups. The application of the second
is less clear; superficially it might be considered as an explanation of the
non-competitive nature of alternative media, but it also has to do with
methods of organization within and across media that typically operate
via a network. The aim of this chapter is to examine how alternative
media organize themselves within this network:

a network of active relationships between actors who interact, communicate,

influence each other, negotiate, and make decisions. Forms of organization
 NEW SOC I A L M 0 V EMEN T S 83

and models of leadership, communicative channels and technologies of

communication are constitutive parts of this network of relationships.
(Melucci, 1996: 75)

In Melucci's reading of social movements the role of the network and

that of communication - of media as activators of that network - assume a
key position. Organizational forms are the building-blocks of the network.
These forms, as Melucci asserts, tend away from the traditional, hierarchi-
cal and bureaucratic forms of social organization; in this respect, they
demonstrate Welsh's claim that collective action 'eschews existing channels
of resistance' (Welsh and McLeish, 1996: 30) and maintain 'an informal
and irreverent posture towards the established norms and rituals of main-
stream politics' (Scott, 1990: 34). It is these radically organized groups that
make manifest the 'hidden networks' that ultimately define social move-
ment activity (Melucci, 1996). These forms of organization are characteri-
zed by loose internal structures and by autonomy of the groups thus
organized. Loose structures are most commonly realized in social move-
ments by the absence (or at least, the reduction) of hierarchy and by
an anti-authoritarian ethos. Job rotation is common, as is the sharing of jobs
and skills. Membership is fluid: often there are few if any criteria for
membership, save active involvement in the group. Consensus and collective
decision-making are preferred over voting. The extent to which the alterna-
tive media of new social movements have adopted such forms of organiza-
tion, to what ends and with what success is the subject of this chapter.
My focus is on the activist-run, grassroots alternative press of the UK.
I will examine four nationally distributed titles that best exemplify the
relationship between the non-aligned sociopolitical movements and the
alternative media that support them. These titles comprise a broad cate-
gory of 'environmental anarchist' publications, which were a distinguish-
ing feature of the British alternative press in the 1990s. With the exception
of Green Anarchist, all were founded in the 1990s. All continue to publish
in printed form, except for Squall, which ceased quarterly publication in
1997, becoming Squall Magazine Online. The information on Squall in
this and the following chapter relates only to the printed version.
Do or Die, subtitled Voices from Earth First!, was founded in 1992 and,
though it hoped to appear more frequently at its outset, has now become
an annual digest of reports and features based on the activities of one part
of the environmental activist movement, the radical direct action group
Earth First!. It has experimented with format and size, having been pub-
lished in AS and A4 formats, settling on AS in 1996. It is currently the
only alternative press title to be perfect-bound. It is also the longest of these
four titles in extent; each new issue has been longer than its predecessors.
84 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

Its extent enables it to offer a wide content: detailed news reports from
home and abroad, lengthy theoretical and philosophical articles, book
reviews and features on tactics for protests.
If Do or Die can be said to have a single, overarching aim it is that
described in the lead sentence of an editorial that appeared in its second
issue, namely that it 'is dedicated to direct action to protect the biological
diversity of this planet from the bigness of human development' ('Short
Blah', Do or Die, 2, April-May 1993, unpaginated). It is explicit about
encouraging activists to contribute to the magazine, not only to discuss
ideas but to enable them to provide 'in depth reporting'. Do or Die hopes
'to create a space where the people behind the news stories get to put their
message across unmediated' (from Do or Die - Voices from Earth First!,
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uklcampaigns/efhtmls/dod.html). The strapline
on the front cover of the first issue calls Do or Die 'The voice of the British
Earth First! movement'; by issue 2 it is simply 'A voice', by issue 5 plural-
ity within the movement is explicit: 'Voices from Earth First!'. In 1999 it
broadened its scope further to encompass 'Voices from the ecological
resistance'. In the words of 'Dom', a member of the editorial collective,
the aim is 'to have pieces that broaden the focus and step outside of the
ideological ghetto, to have something for everyone, a grab-bag ... to give
people a sense of possibilities, to not succumb to dogma'. Dom also makes
a nice distinction between two types of 'activist': the 'professional
activists' who work for such organizations as Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace and who take part in large-scale actions to raise awareness of
issues through media exposure, and activists who are 'ordinary people',
undertaking actions to effect an immediate change:

and the strongest campaigns have always been those with a tightly knit, reso-
lute community of 'ordinary' people at their heart - and they often show up
the 'professionals' or 'activists' as ineffectual or playacting. I would like to
help engender such community struggles, and to represent them and their
aspirations. (Dom, from an interview conducted by the author)

Green Anarchist is a quarterly tabloid of 20 pages (on average). It was

founded in 1984 (for the first half of its life it was produced as an A4
magazine), and represents another strand in the anarcho-environmentalist
movement with its vision of an anti-technological, primitivist society. It
does, however, draw on the events, campaigns and protests of the wider
environmental and anarchist movements. Its range of articles is similar to
that of Do or Die, though its lengthier articles almost all deal with theory
and philosophy within the 'green anarchist' movement.
Throughout its life it has been the subject of much controversy and
criticism both within and outside the anarchist and the environmentalist
 NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 85

movements. Such criticism has come mostly from its increasing support
for violent activity, against people as ~ell as property. The 'Gandalf' con-
spiracy trial of three people responsible for the production of Green
Anarchist centred on the magazine's alleged incitement of its readers to
violent action (Atton, 1998). The 1990s saw the magazine move increas-
ingly towards an agenda that supports and promotes violent direct-action
tactics. It has published instructions for making 'your own shotgun'
(GA 27, Summer 1991), bombs and caltrops (GA 30, Summer 1992). More
recently it has offered support to the radical animal rights group the
Justice Department, Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber. Its current
strapline is perhaps the most accurate summary of Green Anarchist's pre-
serit purpose: 'For the destruction of Civilization'. Its strategy, a blend of
cultural, political, social and economic interventions, had already been
given a name in an earlier editorial: 'Green Anarchist strategy is revolu-
tion on the periphery' (GA, 11, April-May, 1986: 2). It aims to function
as a means of communication, to 'provide a forum for [committed
activists] to find out what's going on in their own and other resistance
milieus and to discuss this via our pages' (from an interview with Oxford
Green Anarchists, the group primarily responsible for Green Anarchist).
In spite of its chosen medium, the weekly free-sheet SchNEWS
(founded in 1994) appears distrustful of the printed word. A slogan often
repeated in its pages is: 'A single act of defiance is worth a thousand angry
words.' Its primary aim does not appear to be the straightforward act of
reporting, but to promote political activism amongst its readers:
'Ultimately the idea of SchNEWS is to encourage people to get off their
bums, go see things for themselves and make up their own minds' (unti-
tled article, SchNEWSround, 1997, unpaginated). The reason for this is
found in SchNEWS's origins. It grew out of an activist collective based in
Brighton whose members came together in 1994 to oppose the Criminal
Justice Act. Their first high-profile action was the squatting of Brighton
courthouse. Consequently, Justice? (as the collective is known; the ironic
question mark is part of the name) has remained active, organizing par-
ties, maintaining a collective allotment, running street stalls and other
events (McKay, 1996: 175-177). From this perspective, its collation of
'unique weekly snapshots of the phenomenal rise of positive direct
action' (statement from the back cover of SchNEWS Reader, 1996; also
reproduced on an advertising flyer for the book) is less to be considered
as news, more as 'information for action', as goads to personal involve-
ment and empowerment. In relation to the radical community press of
the 1970s, Brian Whitaker calls this 'useful information' (Whitaker, 1981:
105). Media researchers in the US call it 'mobilizing information' (MI).
By this they mean information, appended to or embedded in a news
86 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

report, that provides the reader with the wherewithal to pursue the story
further; typically, to become actively involved in the issue being reported.
This usually takes the form of details of a meeting or demonstration,
giving time, place and date and contact details for further information
(Bybee, 1982; Lemert and Ashman, 1983). It has been found that alter-
native newspapers are more likely to supply MI than their mainstream
counterparts, and that of these, the 'activist' alternative newspaper sup-
plies it most frequently (Stanfield and Lemert, 1987). In the present
cases, information for action often goes much further than this, encour-
aging readers to develop their own tactics, which can, range from 'block-
ades' of 'guilty' companies and government departments (telephone and
fax numbers are published), to more militant techniques (Green Anarchist
has, over the years, published articles on how to build police radio
jammers and primitive firearms; Do or Die~s 'Dear Nora' column is ded-
icated to techniques for disabling earth-moving equipment and other
ways of disrupting road-building activities (known as 'ecotage')}.
SchNEWS does not set out any further aims or objectives; an interview
with its editors elicited no more than a reiteration of these sentiments and
in particular that of 'information for action'. However, the sentiments it
expresses in an editorial statement resemble those of Do or Die in its
more explicit objectives. Just as Do or Die recognizes diversity of opin-
ion, so too does SchNEWS: 'diversity is our strength' ('SchNEWS - As It
Is', SchNEWS Reader, 1996, unpaginated). It seeks to involve as many
people as possible through its pages: 'The DIY media has exploded and
there are many views, many sources ... from the heart of a fluid, organic,
evolving movement of empowerment - "DIY culture'" (ibid.). The open-
ing of an article entitled 'Underground Overground' approvingly quotes
'Jamie', a member of the Small World Media alternative news video
group:

The underground media is produced by activists - bored of not being given

a platform, we create our own; bored of being misquoted, we quote each
other; bored of going on actions, then rushing horne to find the news either
disregarding us, or distorting our deeds and words. ('Underground
Overground', SchNEWS, 101, 13 December 1996)

Whilst focusing on environmental activism, Squall also provided cover-

age of and for the 'new travellers', the free festival scene and the squat-
ting movement in the UK. Its size (from 1995, an average of 64 pages
per issue) enabled it to report in much more detail than SchNEWS,
though its frequency meant that it was inevitably less current. As with Do
or Die and Green Anarchist, it found a place for the cultural activities of
these movements, whilst being less focused on theory and philosophy. Its
 NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 87

longer features showed a tendency to blend the political with the 'human
interest' story, spotlighting initiatives by named groups and individuals
within their local communities.
Squall operated in the same broad area as SchNEWS: both had a remit
wider than the environmental issues that are at the heart of Do or Die and
Green Anarchist's coverage. Squall was keen, however, to express its
closeness to the environmental movement, stating its main aim as '[t]o
battle for a better environment - countryside, urban and psychological'
('Information Is Your Weapon', Squall, 9, Winter 1995: 3). In common
with SchNEWS it has grown out of an activist collective 'lowLIFE?! [sic],
based in London. After two years organizing 'large cultural events in
London squats' the first issue of Squall was produced in 1992 on the col-
lective's computer (Carey, 1998: 60). It began as a magazine 'for the
squatter-homeless' (masthead on Squall, 2, August (1992)), widening its
audience to 'squatters, travellers and other itinerants' (masthead on
Squall, 5, October/November 1993) and publishing articles of wider
interest to those involved in environmental and non-aligned political
activism. Also in common with SchNEWS it presented its news and fea-
tures not merely as information (and certainly not as entertainment) for
a passive reader, but as information 'to tool you up', that is, to furnish
materials with which readers could achieve certain practical objectives.
This 'tooling up' is itself a metaphor taken from warfare (meaning 'to
arm oneself') and the theme of struggle continues in the title of many of
its editorial statements (as in the reference above): 'Information Is Your
Weapon'. Like the other titles, Squall was concerned with increasing
access to this mobilizing information.
This is not provided in a unilinear fashion by a controlling medium;
instead it is the product of discussion, debate and other communications
between participants in the 'action' itself. As a medium for communica-
tion within the alternative public sphere, such papers and magazines hope
to build agendas and develop opinion. This will come from as wide a
range of participants as possible; communication is encouraged across
movements and communities, including those potentially in conflict; the
media space available is to be open to a wide array of voices and opin-
ions. These, at least, are what the aims of the alternative media as expli-
cated in these four titles indicate. In such ways agendas and opinions are,
ideally, to be shaped by a wider participation in the pages of the alter-
native media than is usually the case in the pages of the mainstream
media. Here we see exemplified John Downing's four theoretical princi-
ples that we met in Chapter 1 (an emphasis on the 'multiple realities' of
social life, freedom from party and intelligentsia, the privileging of move-
ments over institutions, prefigurative politics). Even though the grand
88 A LT ERN A T IV E M ED I A

aim of 'changing the world' might not easily be achieved (if it ever is
achieved), the provision of 'information for action' within an organiza-
tional model that is based on empowerment might at least 'provide stag-
ing posts along the way, moments of transformation, however small'
(ibid.). The value of such activism can only come from the involvement
of as many people as possible; by multiplying those 'moments of trans-
formation' and by encouraging their profusion through self-education
and a culture of activism, the alternative media hope to meet their aim of
empowerment through 'information for action'. All four titles carry the
implicit opportunity for any activist (and possibly, if not practically, all
activists) to be part of the processes of creation, production and distribu-
tion. Activists are never to be mere readers or consumers; they are
encouraged to be organizers, producers and writers. How these media are
organized to permit such opportunities is the subject of the next section.

Approaches to Organization
and Production

Do or Die

Do or Die is explicit in that it is a collective, in this case one that centres

around one group of the British Earth First! movement, Mid Somerset
Earth First!. However, this collective is only responsible for the collec-
tion, editing and production of the magazine; it relies on the remaining
Earth First! groups (and other sympathetic organizations and individuals)
to submit news and features. (Number 5 acknowledges the contributions
of 36 groups and 'countless individuals'. A flyer for this issue begins: 'Do
or Die No.5 has been written by over 60 activists from the British and
worldwide environmental frontlines', a similar flyer for no. 7 claims 'over
80 activists'.) Problems with co-ordinating such a diverse - and deliber-
ately unorganized - network led to difficulties in ensuring punctual sub-
mission of copy: 'due to the difficulty of getting campaigns to write
reports to deadline, we have set up a network of regional reporters', who
also act as 'collection points' for campaign reports from the regional
Earth First! groups (from an interview with Dom). Whilst the editors of
Do or Die seek to involve as many people as possible in all aspects of the
magazine's production, at the time of my interview with Dom (March
1997), there were only three regular members of the collective. They
were assisted by occasional contributions from a handful of other people,
 NEW SOC I A L M 0 V EMEN T 5 89

who often worked with them for one issue only. There was little division
of labour: everyone involved in an issue 'wears many different hats':

We're all responsible for soliciting pieces, editing them, writing stuff, laying
out, gathering graphics and photos, publicity, mailing out free copies,
answering orders, physically selling, you name it.

Dom admitted that their working methods were 'haphazard': 'I'm not
quite sure how we do it, which may partly explain why we're so bloody
irregular.' He continued: 'our different hats have a worrying tendency to
slip off, cos we've got so much more important things to do instead' (such
as the activism that is at the heart of the Earth First! movement and simply
'having a life, mmm, that would be nice', as he put it). He is in no doubt
that improvements could be made. Indeed, they favour 'a more con-
scious, structured approach' which, whilst espousing the collective as the
main method, would nevertheless eschew the random 'free-for-all' that
Landry et al. (1985) find in many collective endeavours. At the same time
Do or Die hopes to increase the number of people involved. Although the
current editorial collective admits to feeling 'possessive' about their roles,
Dom wants to encourage more people to contribute skills (as well as arti-
cles) in order to promote diversity of opinion within the movement and
to prevent it from falling into inertia ('I'd actually like to have a lot more
views in it that completely contradict my own, and set the cat amongst
the radical pigeons.') It is the tension between that possessiveness and its
openness to new people and ideas that may well save the magazine from
the worst collective inefficiencies.
Do or Die is the only title to provide specific 'instructions for authors'
and is prepared to accept all that it receives, of whatever length, as long
as it conforms to these instructions. Its ability to encourage so much
material is a direct result of its flexible approach - expanding to what-
ever size it needs to accommodate what it chooses to publish. It is no
surprise that the magazine is particularly interested in first-person
accounts of environmental destruction: '[w]hen you discover an incidence
of eco-rape, immediately write down a description of it, what you feel,
and what you believe you can do about it' ('Short Blah', Do or Die, 2,
April-May 1993, unpaginated) Although 'discovery' need not entail
physical proximity to the event, the authenticity of immediate reaction
to it is crucial; certainly there is no expectation of objectivity. More than
simple reporting and reaction, the magazine also wants its writers to
supply suggestions for action to improve the situation. Empowerment is
explicitly mentioned: 'articles should empower people to do something'
(ibid.). Yet the magazine is not recommending the privileging of subjec-
tive accounts above accuracy; it expects the rigour of references: 'any
90 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

facts or statistics quoted must carry references to their sources - without

these an article is useless' (ibid.).
Only this single editorial provides detail on how to present an article;
subsequent calls for submissions are much more general ('Send your
material to us now!' shouts the editorial in issue 4). Little is said about
content. Underneath such liberality, however, runs a current of concern
about the 'dilution' of the magazine (and the movement): 'other groups
have been swamped by well-meaning but naive recruits and lost their
original radicalism' (ibid.). Despite its openness to diversity of opinion,
information and proposals for action within its pages, Do or Die is con-
cerned with the 'recuperation' of radical groups into mainstream envi-
ronmental protest groups (such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace),
where direct action by anyone save nominated 'professional activists' is
discouraged. Within Do or Die, readers are expressly warned against con-
tributing anything that might be accused of recuperation or reformism
('If you don't like it, do your own mag', they are told ('Idiotorial', Do or
Die, 3, late 1993: 2).
A major part of the production of the magazine, Dom admitted, is in
'commissioning' articles and chasing up writers when they fail to deliver
promised copy, which seems to be a regular occurrence. He is sympathetic,
though, since he knows that the writers - like the editors of the magazine
themselves - are primarily activists: 'to be fair, most people give their all
to campaigns and are physical and mental wrecks as a result of it, so to
expect them to write an article about it as well may be a bit much'.
Most of the articles that appear in Do or Die are commissioned; very
few are unsolicited. Whilst the flexible length of the magazine can always
accommodate whatever the editors choose to publish, it is wrong to
assume that its length has continually increased due to the number of arti-
cles it happens to receive. Instead, it is the result of a conscious effort by
the collective to encourage (and provoke) activists to write for the maga-
zine and to be more 'ambitious' (Dom's word) with each issue. The maga-
zine's guidelines may not be as formal or as precise as those of, say,
academic journals, nevertheless they indicate that the editors have expec-
tations of their writers that must be met. Despite its collective approach
to production, distribution and editing, Do or Die places responsibility
for the writing firmly on the writers themselves, offering 'positive sug-
gestions of criticism' (Dom's words) where necessary for writers to
improve their own contributions. That individual writers are expected to
take responsibility for their own work is also evident in the editorial col-
lective's statement that the magazine 'does not pretend to be the official
voice of EF!' nor are its contents 'automatically the views of the editorial
collective, the Earth First! movement, Earth First! groups or individual
 NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 91

Earth First!ers [sic],. (Though in its zeal to emphasize editorial neutrality

such a denial itself denies that the views must belong to someone.) The
emphasis on the personal, the individual, rather than the corporate view
is borne out by further examination of the magazine's guidelines, where
the general rubric of any submission is sketched out. The emphasis is on
the involved, activist writer reporting from within the event, describing
it in personal terms, 'what you feel, and what you believe you can do
about it'. This, along with the avoidance of editorial responsibility for
content, might also be judged by the absence of the editorial statement as
a vehicle for opinion on particular issues. The editorials mostly concen-
trate on guidelines, apologies for lateness and encouraging submissions.
The very titling of Do or Die's editorial as an 'Idiotorial' speaks of a self-
deprecating, self-ironic view of the editors as knowing no more (perhaps
even less?) than their writers and readers, while taking an ironic view of
the practice of editorial writing in general.

Squall

The editors of Squall were less forthcoming, in print, about their work
practices, which might be put down to their more 'professional' image
and commitment to journalistic standards that resemble those of main-
s~ream newspapers more than any of the other alternative titles in this
study. For all that, they favoured a resolutely non-mainstream approach
to organization: all editing and sub-editing was done collectively by a
group whose membership varied 'according to availability'. Once more,
the publication took its place behind more pressing commitments, such
as activism or daily life. In Squall's case, this could easily mean editors
finding a place to live, since many of those involved were squatters. As
with Do or Die, however, Squall was conscious of the weakness of full
collective organization, and was developing towards a situation that
recognized the different talents of different people 'where people perform
the tasks to which they are most suited' and where more defined roles
based on ability and skill can interlock: 'Together we are spokes in a
wheel that rolls' (from an interview with the editors). Whilst the roles of
editors, reporters and production workers were shared, they were shared
by a relatively small group of people (five or six, though once - with
Squall 11 - nine individuals could be considered as comprising the col-
lective) in a single location, London ('The State We're In: a Notice to
Readers', Squall, 14, Autumn 1996: 12). No staff lists were available,
but it was possible to identify a small number of people, of which two
92 A LT ERN AT I V E M ED I A

(Sam Beale and Jim Carey) were the most prominent and might be
considered as the paper's main editors and writers. Even within this small
group, Squall found room for improvement. Its size meant that many
tasks were shared, that a small number of people had many responsibili-
ties. Squall hoped to be accepted as an equal of the mainstream media in
terms of the professionalism of its reporting and its design:

[w]ere the magazine to lie on the shelves next to any other, the casual
browser should not immediately be able to tell that one was produced by a
fully paid commercial staff and one by a bunch of committed volunteers.
(Carey, 1998: 66)

Consequently, sharing too many tasks was felt as an obstacle to that

professionalism. An editorial hoped for:

a full volunteer staff ... to be assembled to run the magazine. Each with only
a small number of defined roles, rather than the multi-storey car park of
duties currently taken on by each of the Squall posse ... with a wider team
of writers, photographers and designers. ('The State We're In' p. 12; empha-
sis added)

Squall's organization centred around a small editorial group of five

people, though others were encouraged to write for it: 'anyone can write
for Squall but obviously the magazine has a criterion of expression qual-
ity' (from interview). Its features are the closest any of the four titles
comes to 'professional' writing (some of Squall's writers also write for
mainstream publications), in that they demonstrate the conventions of
news schemata and, despite the advocacy of activism and direct action
protest, they seek to provide information that can go wider than their
interest groups. Squall's letters page frequently included (approving)
letters from MPs and sympathetic mainstream journalists and campaign-
ers (it is the only title where such correspondence appears): evidence that
the paper was not only reaching the political mainstream but that its mes-
sages were being read and supported by some within that mainstream.
Sam Beale, one of Squall's editors, has spoken of 'writing to the bridge':
'to me that means MPs not being able to say they don't know [i.e., that they
have not been informed of the issues Squall writes about]. I want my mum
to read it, so she can be informed' (Wakefield and Grrrt [sic], 1995: 7).
Anyone therefore 'may' write for Squall, but the editors placed a stress
on 'nurturing' prospective writers to enable them to write in a style
harmonious with the rest of the paper. This 'effectively operates as a
training scheme', but since the editors did not have much time to spend
on such training - being activists as well as writers, - the group of regu-
lar writers tended to stay small. The emphasis was on developing 'an
 NEW SOC I A L M 0 V EMEN T 5 93

evolving body of feature writers whom we know write well'. This pool of
writers presented ideas at editorial meetings and then particular writers
were 'commissioned' (so to speak; little or no payment was involved) to
write on certain topics. This was not a closed group, but still one whose
new writers were carefully selected by the editorial group. The editors
admitted that they received 'masses of stuff, from scribbles on the backs of
chip wrappers to mighty tomes of ideological treatise'. They would publish
none of this, preferring to identify topics of importance to their readers
and choosing (or training) a specific writer to produce a feature.

SchNEWS

For SchNEWS even the term 'collective' is perhaps too formal. Its organi-
zation is extremely fluid, the number of people involved in its production
contracting and expanding almost on a daily basis. At one time it com-
prised as many as 25 people Oay Griffiths, cited in SchNEWS Reader,
1996, unpaginated). In addition to the members of this group - any or all
of whom might take part in every aspect of the paper's production - the
collective is open to the possibility of transient members 'who'll bash in
a few hundred words' ('SchNEWS - As It Is', SchNEWS Reader, 1996):
'It's not a clique. Nobody is a "member", you won't be given a member-
ship form to fill in, and nobody tells you what to do' (~bout Justice?',
from the SchNEWS web site; http://www.cbuzz.co.uklSchNEWS/justice/
index.htm).
Rather than spending its time criticizing mainstream business practices
or even promoting the values of the collective, SchNEWS disparagingly -
yet celebratorily - calls itself a 'disorganization', publishing weekly out of
apparent chaos, out of that 'hectic mayhem called, ominously, "the
office'" ('SchNEWS - As It Is'). We should be wary of reading too much
into what is surely meant (at least partly) ironically. After all, the publi-
cation, for all its brevity, does appear regularly every week. Though its
distribution is occasionally haphazard (subscribers have complained that
at times no issue appears, then the last three appear in one envelope), the
concerted effort required to produce such a publication should not be
ignored. However fluid, however casual the editors may seem to be, how-
ever random their methods may appear from their own descriptions, the
work gets done. I believe that their deliberate self-effacement springs
from a desire not to be seen as autocratic decision-makers, nor to be con-
sidered a clique. By presenting an image of amateurism and disorganiza-
tion, they seek to attract people to participate who might otherwise be
94 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

put off by a more 'professional' approach. For SchNEWS is organized:

whilst no single person or group wishes to be considered 'in charge', a
handful of people in SchNEWS's Brighton office co-ordinate the paper's
editorial and production, and others oversee distribution and the paper's
World Wide Web site. Yet these people do not wish to set themselves
above others as 'experts': they want to share their knowledge and skills
with as many as want to work with them. They also want to share the
knowledge and skills of others.
I experienced this at first hand when, following my interview with
Warren of SchNEWS and correspondence with its 'webmaster' Toby, I
was asked by them to provide an index for the paper's third collection of
SchNEWS in book form (SchNEWS Annual, 1998). It gradually emerged
that what they really wanted me to produce was a 'guide to indexing
SchNEWS' so that they (and other workers on the paper) could produce
their own indexes in the future. For SchNEWS, such empowerment is
central; specialists are useful to the degree that they can offer education
and training to others. The specialist is perceived not as a remote expert,
but as a co-worker. SchNEWS offers training days for prospective reporters.
These take place in Brighton, where SchNEWS is based, and provide
training in writing stories, desktop publishing and database management.
The paper hopes to break down the barriers that an 'expert culture' often
puts in the way of grassroots empowerment. SchNEWS's preferred self-
image of disorganization and chaos is part of this demystification and
promotes access to the paper for all those who want it. It is clear, how-
ever, that, in common with Do or Die, SchNEWS generally suffers from
a lack of people who are regularly involved, with predictable results:
'There will be no SchNEWS next week cos not only are we really busy,
but we knackered [sic] and we need more people to get involved!'
('SchNEWS Training Day', SchNEWS, 153/154, 6 February 1998).
SchNEWS collapses writing and editing into a single, collective process:
'Someone will start writing, someone else will add a little nuance, a factoid
or two.' An overall style is identifiable, nevertheless: final writing irons
out individual quirks and voices, leaving a 'communal voice' that is
irreverent, colloquial, plain-speaking and often self-ironic. But this too is
deceptive, since the process generates far more copy than will fit in the
two sides of A4 that comprise a typical issue: 'Before long it's grown to
ten times ... and half of it disappears again' ('SchNEWS - As It Is',
SchNEWS Reader, 1996). However, it is impossible to know which half
'disappears'. For all its lack of reference to the editing process, it is obvi-
ous that SchNEWS is edited, just as for all the talk of 'disorganization',
there is a work schedule of sorts, though this takes its place as part of a
wider schedule of domestic work, activism and play, described in a leaflet
 NEW SOC I A L M 0 V EMEN T S 95

produced by the Justice? collective and summarized by George McKay

(1996: 177):

Monday is for gardening at the Justice? allotment; Tuesday is a day off;

Wednesday is for weekly meetings ending up in the pub; Thursday is for
putting SchNEWS together; Friday is printing and distribution day, followed
by the pub; Saturday there's a street stall; Sunday is for chilling out. Actions
and parties are fitted around these regular events.

In practice, SchNEWS is put together over two days, Wednesday and

Thursday. The regular members of the collective:

rely on people coming in [to the SchNEWS 'office'], ringing up, writing sto-
ries, passing us bits of paper in the pub, taking bits from the paper [i.e. the
mainstream press] , [and from the] underground press. Someone starts a
story, someone else adds a bit, someone else has their say - means you can't
have an ego or say 'that's my story'. Sit around on Thursday evening -
people shouting out headlines. (Warren, from an interview conducted by the
author)

Here we see alternative media production taking its place in everyday

routines amongst subsistence and leisure. For its producers SchNEWS
appears as important as their more mundane activities. By preserving the
production of the paper as an unprofessionalized and deinstitutionalized
activity its producers weave it into the quotidian fabric of their lives. If
the content of SchNEWS is about changing lives and defending the envi-
ronment in order to better enjoy life, and its form a model for enabling
others to participate in it or indeed produce similar media, then it is
appropriate that the publication itself should be an inextricable part of
living, not something to be bracketed off in 'the office'.

Green Anarchist

In 1984 Green Anarchist's organizational beginnings centred around

three people, two editors and a designer and paste-up artist, Richard
Hunt. This lasted for two years, during which time Hunt began to make
significant editorial contributions: the magazine's economic analysis, for
example, is largely his. Hunt was also responsible at this time for develop-
ing the magazine's support of violent direct action. It was this last that
effectively split the editorial group. Albon and Christo departed in 1986,
leaving Hunt in sole charge until 1988. A short-lived attempt to establish
an editorial group in Oxford, the magazine's home at the time (and the
96 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

city itself, not the university), 'detonated after 2 issues' in 1987 ('Green
Anarchist: the First Ten Years', GA 36, Winter 1994: 7).
Another attempt at collective decision-making was made in 1988, with
a group of local contributors and supporters persuading Hunt to develop
the magazine on more anarchist lines, in accord with its manifesto. A col-
lective approach would be an appropriate way of putting its prefigurative
politics of 'revolution on the periphery' into practice. A partial form of
collective decision-making and editorial responsibility was developed,
prompted by the arrival of Paul Rogers (like Albon, an anarcho-pacifist)
and Kevin Lano (of the Anarchist Sexual Liberation Movement). This was
only partial, as from 1986 until his departure in the autumn of 1991,
Hunt was effectively the magazine's owner, controlling its bank account
and overseeing its administration and production. Indeed, it was the
exercise of this control that forced the other members of the editorial col-
lective to agree to the publication of Hunt's 'support our boys' editorial
on the Gulf War in GA 28. They were able, however, to have a right of
reply beside Hunt's piece, rebutting his opinions. In the face of the dis-
sent of the majority of the collective, Hunt left the magazine: 'he could-
n't take criticism and so resigned' ('Green Anarchist: the First Ten Years').
Less than a year after Hunt's departure, in 1992, the magazine was
relaunched as 'a magazine and a movement'. First, there was the division
of the organization of Green Anarchist into three functions: 'the maga-
zine and the movement', street-selling and subscriptions, and the mail
order catalogue. Each group worked autonomously with no overall con-
trol. Co-ordination of activities and all decision-making were made col-
lectively. Furthermore, the groups were geographically separate, based in
three English locations: Oxford, Lancaster and Camberley (Surrey).
(Camberley is around 40 miles south-east of Oxford; Lancaster around
200 miles north-west of Oxford.) In the following year there was further
decentralization of the magazine's editorial functions. As from GA 33
(Autumn 1993) the receipt and editing of copy was also divided into
three: general editorial (remaining in Oxford), news editorial and
'counter-culture' (the magazine's review pages). The last two were fur-
ther divided into categories, news into eight and counter-culture into
four. Given some overlap between divisions (for instance, the Oxford
editorial collective was also responsible for two of the counter-culture
'departments'), the magazine was now edited from seven geographical
locations in England and Scotland. Contributions to the 'core' (the dom-
inant theme in any issue) were edited by the groups in rotation. By the
time of my interview with the group responsible for co-ordinating the
production of the paper (Oxford Green Anarchists) in February 1997,
there had been some consolidation of roles and duties, since this extreme
 NEW SOC I A L M 0 V EMEN T S 97

form of decentralization had proved inefficient for the timely production

of copy. The number of news departments had shrunk to four ('commu-
nity resistance', 'ecodefence', 'animal liberation' and 'sexual politics');
instead of an entire group being'responsible for 'the core' a single member
of a group was now nominated and this post rotated for each issue.
Despite the clawback in the decentralized editing of the magazine, the
expansion of the magazine into a movement prompted a further phase of
decentralization early in 1994. It was Paul Rogers who, since his arrival
on the magazine, 'had been working to turn the magazine into a move-
ment, promoting local groups' ('Green Anarchist: the First Ten Years').
These local groups were first listed in GA 34 (Spring 1994) with the
establishment of nine local co-ordinators (and 'additional contacts' for
each area) in the British Isles, an international co-ordinator, and a hand-
ful of international contacts. Again, there was some overlap between
the roles of co-ordinators and editors. At this stage, Green Anarchist (the
movement and the magazine) was organized from 34 locations in the
British Isles (plus five international locations). Since this drastic decen-
tralization, some slippage has taken place: the list of local co-ordinators
has lost three of its original nine regions. GA 40-41 (Spring 1996)
reverted - without comment - to the single editorial address in Oxford
for all contributions: articles, news, reviews and letters (this is preferred
operationally: material received centrally is then distributed to the rele-
vant editor). It still maintains its initial tripartite functional split, how-
ever, and the magazine (now referred to, in the spirit of the times, as a
'zine') and the movement are still considered as separate functions of a
single organization (this is emphasized by the regular editorial and infor-
mational pages at the back of the magazine, one headed 'GA: the Zine',
the other 'GA: the Network').
The present editors do not consider their activities to be collectively
organized (in response to my question: 'Are editing and production done
collectively?' the answer was brief: 'No'), though many people are
involved. The organization is certainly highly devolved, and might well
entail collective activity at a local level - many of the local groups in the
UK that contribute to the running of Green Anarchist (both the movement
and the magazine) are run on a collective basis and are effectively 'affinity
groups', that is, not formally connected or formally part of Green
Anarchist. Collective activity thus takes place at a level removed from the
core group that co-ordinates the production of the magazine (Oxford
Green Anarchists). Isolated individual activity also plays a part: Noel
Molland has described how, as an animal rights activist, he compiled the
'Diary of Animal Liberation' for the magazine without having met 'anyone
else connected to Green Anarchist' (Molland, 1998: unpaginated).
98 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED IA

The decentralization of Green Anarchist's organization may be viewed

as a realization of its own desideratum for society as a whole. This break
with hierarchy is stressed by one of the present editorial collective: 'I
don't see a society which is hierarchic ... is a viable or sustainable one'
(cited in Chan, 1995: 49). It is perhaps not reading too much into this
particular history to view it as a microcosm of the way in which many
anarchists predict the development of anarchism in society at large, as the
limits on individual and collective freedom that are placed by hierarchi-
cal methods of organization become intolerable. It is to transcend such
limits that those individuals organize for their mutual benefit. Such is the
case with Green Anarchist. Are there other benefits to decentralization?
Beyond its prefigurative and empowering values, Green Anarchist itself is
explicit about the economics of decentralization: it 'make[s] it cheaper to
get UABs [Urgent Action Bulletins] circulated nationally and to speed up
production time of the mag' ('Editorial', GA 33, Winter 1993: 17). A
magazine such as Green Anarchist gets little of its revenue from advertis-
ing; it has no capital reserves, surviving precariously from issue to issue.
It needs to economize everywhere it can. Even though none of its 'staff'
are paid, finances are never healthy. By decentralizing the circulation of
its Urgent Action Bulletins (supplements to the magazine and a mainstay
of communication and participation in 'the movement'), a single large
postal bill is avoided. Local distributors can be ingenious, using other
groups' existing mailings (many local co-ordinators also co-ordinate local
anarchist groups) or handing out bulletins at meetings and events in their
areas. Organizationally, devolving the receipt and the editing of copy
places less burden on a single group; promised reports can be chased up,
closer contacts established within smaller groupings of writers and
editors. Edited copy for an entire section of the magazine can then be
sent ready for typesetting to the main editorial group. These approaches
harmonize well with the philosophy of Green Anarchist: 'Bigger isn't
better - never organise on the principles of mass. If a group's getting too
big ... split it. If one group in a network is developing monopoly, get
them to teach what they know to everyone else or share their sources'
('Revolution on the Periphery', GA 33, Winter 1993: 6).

Participation and Control

Many alternative publications in previous decades - regardless of their

provenance or their particular version of collective organization - have
 NEW SOC I A L M 0 V EMEN T S 99

suffered tensions and difficulties in their organizational methods: the

problems of autocratic decision-making; the unwieldiness of consensual
decision-making processes; the split between the core of regular writers
or members of an editorial collective and a larger group of less perma-
nent contributors; and the differences in commitment that such a split
can bring. Comedia (1984) and Landry et al. (1985) hold that such non-
hierarchical, collective methods can only disadvantage alternative media,
because they are always adopted for ideological, never economic, ends.
This argument is not a new one in radical milieux. Jo Freeman's (1972-73)
classic critique of structurelessness in the women's movement, though
not concerned with economics, makes much the same points in the wider
context of political organizing. Freeman argued that structurelessness
inevitably led to political impotence, since the 'more unstructured a
movement is, the less control it has over the directions in which it devel-
ops and the political actions in which it engages' (p. 161). Neither is free-
dom from structure any guarantee of freedom from the creation of elites
or stars within the movement. That they do arise without the movement
taking deliberate, rational action to create them makes them more difficult
for the movement to disperse or direct, since they are already outside
its control.
John Downing (1984) has argued for self-management of the media by
activists themselves, where editorial and production decisions are made
collectively, and communication is horizontal (both within and between
publications). For him the importance of collective organization and
horizontal communication does not reside solely in some notion of ideo-
logical purity or anti-managerial theorizing; he is making a case against
inappropriate bureaucracy and stiflingly hierarchical methods of doing
business. Here he is in agreement with Traber's (1985) notion of the
alternative media concerned with social and political activism amongst
'ordinary people'. It is these concerns that differentiate Downing's
approach from that of Comedia and Landry et al. The latter seem to con-
sider the alternative press simply as an impoverished form of commercial
publishing; for Downing self-managed media are about participation and
communication through self-awareness, through reflexivity amongst the
members of a collective, who must remain sensitive to the cultural and
political conditions that affect their organizational choices. It is this style
of self-management that we see, in various ways, in the four titles.
Moreover, it seems that these titles have not encountered severe organ-
izational problems because they have not employed any of the more
extreme methods of democratic decision-making. Whilst SchNEWS is
apparently open to anyone who wishes to contribute, it does not adver-
tise or hold the kind of open meetings that led to democratic paralysis for
100 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

the likes of the Liverpool Free Press (Whitaker, 1981) and Aberdeen
People's Press (Minority Press Group, 1980a). In its place, we find a core
group that co-ordinates rather than controls. This is also the case with Do
or Die. Squall preferred a stabler organization; for both, membership
of the core group is essential if people want to be involved in decision-
making. This is not to say that the desideratum of increased participation
is necessarily abandoned, rather that each title has found different ways
of squaring the circle of participation and control, at the same time
avoiding some of the deeper pitfalls encountered by their predecessors.
All are keen to involve new contributors: SchNEWS perhaps most con-
spicuously by its easy-going 'come-all-ye' approach to its production.
An especially useful way to view the balance between participation and
control is through Robert Dickinson's (1997) notion of 'formalising' and
'informalising' impulses. Drawing on Bernice Martin's assessment of the
underground movement of the late 1960s as inherently 'anti-structure',
Dickinson finds in subsequent generations of alternative press activity a
continuance of this approach yet a growing recognition of the value of
more formal structures that might 'turn a publication into something
increasingly efficient and conducive to a calculated readership' (1997: 228).
Formal structures do not necessarily supersede informal ones; Dickinson
is careful to identify the value of informalizing impulses in engendering
the creative energy of a publication. He emphasizes the 'close proximity'
of these two impulses, particularly in the early stages of a publication,
where creative energy provides inspiration but more formalizing energies
are soon required for 'stabilising and perpetuating the publication in
terms of design, research, producing copy, sharpening a style, selling
advertising, and so on' (p. 230). I would argue that both tendencies are
also to be found in the later stages too; once formalizing impulses have
provided a structure and encouraged the development of skills, infor-
malizing impulses can be released once more to ensure the vitality of a
publication. These impulses do not necessitate two separate types of
worker; they may be present in the same person, to varying degrees.
With regard to zine publishing, Dickinson goes further, observing that
where there is a single editor/writer, his two types of editor ('structure-
grazer' and 'structure-builder') might well be found in the same person.
I would argue that even in larger organizations such as Squall and
SchNEWS this is very likely to be the case: individuals working for both
these titles are able to take advantage of (and relish) the creativity that
comes from their 'structure-grazing' (even their 'anti-structure' attitude)
whilst appreciating the necessity for tighter organizational controls on,
say, copy dates and distribution networks. In this light, what I called the
'professionalism' of Squall need not be seen as detrimental to its aim of
 NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 101

empowerment. Instead, it is a recognition of the importance of structure

in order to give that empowerment meaning and to ensure that it breeds
results (in the form of 'useful' information written by those actively
involved). SchNEWS offers an example of the close proximity of formal-
izing and informalizing structures: the news reporting and writing of the
paper might well benefit creatively from an informal working method,
whereas to enable the paper to go to press a formal structure is required
to ensure that copy is typeset to deadline, copies mailed out and the
paper's web site updated. The healthy tension that enables both to con-
tribute equally and appropriately to the work of the paper is sustained by
the participatory ethos of the organization that permits such variety to
flourish.
The balance between participation and control is further demonstrated
by the use of the network; indeed, Dickinson identifies this as an engine
of the alternative press. He observes how the network is often 'uncon-
trolled, non-hierarchical, and open' (1997: 101), reflecting many papers'
internal structures. But amongst the titles in my study there exist networks
within each title, which act as 'empowering engines' (to coin a phrase) for
the paper itself, and which further embody the dialectic of structure/
anti-structure. Do or Die and Green Anarchist have developed networks of
independent groups which are able to function as news-gatherers and
writers and which, in the case of Green Anarchist, also have an editorial
function. Decision-making can be made locally, thereby empowering those
away from the centre without the unwieldiness of fully open meetings.
In her critique of radical organization Jo Freeman (1972-73) presents
seven 'principles of democratic structuring': (1) the delegation of author-
ity; (2) taking responsibility for that authority; (3) the distribution of
authority; (4) the rotation of tasks; (5) the allocation of tasks along ratio-
nal criteria; (6) the diffusion of information; and (7) equal access to
resources (pp.163-164). These principles are broadly found in the titles
studied in this chapter, to varying degrees. Where they are not fully devel-
oped, their deficiency is at least recognized (as in the case of Do or Die).
Green Anarchist's present structure exhibits them most precisely, indicat-
ing that by taking a critical approach to its own organization and eschew-
ing the 'structurelessness' of much free collectivization, it has succeeded in
producing a democratic, participatory model- for radical organizing.
Participation and control are also significant in the preference for small
editorial groups. Do or Die and Squall each has a small, stable member-
ship (anything from three to ten), but they are willing to admit new
members as long as they are prepared to get involved and develop the
necessary skills. Do or Die, SchNEWS and Squall offer training and help
to such people, as well as to new writers. Squall was comfortable with its
102 A LT ERN A T IV E M ED IA

size of around ten (Squall's editorial collective was smaller than this but
the figure rises when the regular 'staff' writers are included). The three
editors of Do or Die are less happy with their situation and hope to
involve more people: to provide more 'voices' as well as to ease the con-
tinual problem of contributors missing deadlines. By encouraging more
people to take responsibility for the publication they hope to improve
their receipt of copy. Though Green Anarchist does not call itself a col-
lective, its decentralized, highly inclusive methods of working ensure that
many people have the opportunity to become involved. Green Anarchist
is also looking for ways to involve more people in more decisions, hence
the commitment to rotating the editor's role. SchNEWS encourages all-
comers to get involved, and is the freest and easiest of all, editorially
speaking. But there are still core members from the Justice? collective
who are going to be there to ensure the paper comes out on time, even
though their editorial hand is light. The membership of its editorial/writing
group changes continually.
Here we see the alternative media of new social movements reflecting
the organizational and social structures of the direct-action movements
they document. They exhibit the primary characteristics of the New
Protest: direct participation and local, grassroots decision-making where
resources are diffused and shared within and between groups. They have
as their main function the empowerment of activists in their communities
of resistance. Such media also appear creative, involving individuals and
groups in reflexive practice, enabling them to become communicators. In
his account of the Polish dissident press of the previous decade,
Jakubowicz observes that when groups and individuals are radicalized
they tend to become 'communicators in their own right', establishing
autonomous media, or 'information seekers, eager to seek out media
giving expression to their views and experience' (1991: 158). Such media
then more closely reflect the everyday practices of the decentralized,
directly democratic, self-managed and reflexive networks of 'everyday-
life solidarity' that Melucci finds at the heart of social movement activity.
How the new social movement media encourage their readers to become
'communicators in their own right', what knowledge is produced by
them and what readers do with this knowledge are all addressed in the
next chapter.
 ©m~n~ilJ8i®
5
writers, readers
and knowledge in new
social movement media

Readers as VVriters

Publication that is predicated on the practice of resistance by its

A readers can encourage those readers in one of two ways. First, it

can follow the example of the Communist media of the former
Soviet bloc and seek to enthuse its readership into action, whilst those
writing remain above the readership: a writing elite editorially and organ-
izationally controlled by a hierarchy (Morning Star and Socialist Worker
are of this type). In this model the readership remains passive, only able
to contribute to the publication financially or through its letters page.
Communication is hierarchical and vertical; influence and propaganda
flow downwards. Any upward flow is against the tide: letters to the paper
will be selected and edited, their impact on the publication's contents or
editorial policy unknown, but probably minimal. The weakness of this
approach is that the very agents of resistance (the working class, in this
instance) can be isolated and alienated from those directing them.
In 1928 a proposal was circulated for 'worker correspondents' in a
pamphlet published by the periodical Workers~ Life (Workers~ Life, 1928/
1983). Such contributors have continued to be sought by the working-
class press, though with limited success. This problem was recognized by
the editorial staff of Socialist Worker from its earliest days. In his history
of the paper, Peter Allen notes that as early as the second year of its life,
the number of articles written by workers was increasing, but he gives
no indication as to the size of the increase or whether it continued
104 A LT ERN A T I V E M ED I A

(Allen, 1985: 211). By the mid-1970s Tony Cliff, the leader of the
Socialist Workers' Party, was insisting that '[w]orkers' names will have to
appear in the paper ... more and more often and less and less often the
by-lines of the Paul Foots, Laurie Flynns and Tony Cliffs' (cited by Sparks,
1985: 145). Allen notes that a general appeal to its worker-readers 'did
increase the number of articles written by workers, [but] the increase was
neither dramatic nor sustained' (Allen, 1985: 220). This clearly caused
some anxiety amongst the party's Central Committee, not least to its
leader, Tony Cliff. Writing in 1982, he noted that 'to a large extent work-
ers' writing is limited to a small area of the paper'. His solution was to
propose that the paper became 'a workers' diary' (Allen, 1985: 216), but
Allen provides no evidence to show that the paper evolved even partially
along the lines that Cliff was demanding. It is likely that by the time the
paper recognized the value of readers' contributions, the professional
ethos of the staff writers had all but closed off the readership from feel-
ing that they could contribute any more than a letter to its pages. Letter-
writing aside, readers at most had been paper-sellers at factory gates and
in high streets; to move from this to becoming writers was perhaps too
ambitious a leap to expect 'mere workers' to make.
There is a second way. If the true aim of such publications is 'revolution'
or 'liberation', then 'we cannot imagine them as liberating forces unless
they are open to lateral communication between social beings, with their
multiple experiences and concerns' (Downing, 1984: 19; emphasis in orig-
inal). Turn to the 'non-aligned' alternative press and there is a very differ-
ent approach, prompted less by a centralist, party-led ideology and having
more to do with 'the search for community, and the construction of alter-
native value systems' (Rau, 1994: 13). As the Rochdale Alternative Paper
(RAP) exhorted its readers: 'use RAP to tell your own story... tell us what
you know: what happens in your factory, office, school or area of Town.
tell us what you want or what you hope for' (cited in Dickinson, 1997: 80).
In this chapter I shall argue that knowledge production has become the
province of the activist and the 'common reader' in media that hope to
be participatory and non-hierarchical. I shall also show how a variety of
approaches has developed to offer critical spaces to 'narratives of resis-
tance' written by activists themselves and to theoretical work written by
readers, and examine the implications of such 'equal' platforms and ques-
tion the utility of this subversion of the 'hierarchy of access' to the media.
Are such platforms automatic guarantors of a comprehensive set of dis-
courses? Are all types of knowledge represented? In particular I will ask
how - if at all - discourses of resistance are enriched by such an
approach. To the four titles from the previous chapter will now be added
a wider range of activist-run alternative media.
 W R I T ERS, REA D ERSAN D K NOW LED GEl 05

Knowledge Production and Knowledge

Producers

In their account of cognitive praxis within social movements, Eyerman

and Jamison (1991) offer an extremely inclusive definition of 'knowledge
production', the process whereby social movements create identity and
meaning for themselves and their members. For Eyerman and Jamison,
the movements themselves are 'producers of knowledge' and 'knowledge
is ... the product of a series of social encounters' (p. 55). Knowledge pro-
duction can thus encompass 'the heated debates over meeting agendas
and demonstration slogans and specific organisational activities' (p. 58)
as easily as it can philosophical, theoretical and strategic writings and
speeches.
I shall first examine knowledge production in alt-ernative media as a
function of the type of 'knowledge producer', before looking at the
nature of the various types of knowledge produced, how they are articu-
lated and their value to the movements. In using the term 'knowledge
producer' I focus more narrowly than do Eyerman and Jamison, and
refer not to movements as a whole, but to types of individual knowledge
producer. The most explicit category established by Eyerman and
Jamison is that of 'movement intellectual'. Eyerman and Jamison (1995:
450) define movement intellectuals as those individuals 'who through
their activities articulate the knowledge interests and cognitive identity of
social movements'. This category itself is open to broad interpretation: I
turn first to the contributions made to radical social movement media by
'traditional' or established movement intellectuals, that is, by those intel-
lectuals whose primary activity is intellectual, who either make a living
from their writing and speaking or who at least have gained prominence
through such activities as opposed to through activism. Direct-action
newsletters such as SchNEWS do not admit of such contributions at all
(though on occasion they do use brief quotations by movement intellec-
tuals such as George Monbiot). In part, this is due to their being collec-
tively and anonymously written and edited, though SchNEWS at least has
declared itself to be anti-intellectual: 'it's written by activists - not acad-
emics' (SchNEWSround, 1997, back cover). Earth First!'s journal Do or
Die similarly has little room for such figures: only in its first issue does
one such appear: Derek Wall, academic and prominent member of the
Green Party. Of the wide range of writers appearing in Squall, the best fit
for movement intellectual is the professional writer (for example Steve
Platt - former editor of New Statesman and Society - and once-Guardian
columnist, e.J. Stone), though the number of contributions by this type
106 A LT ERN AT I V E M ED I A

is sInall at less than 5 per cent from issues 1 (1992) to 14 (Autumn 1996).
Green Anarchist, shows the highest percentage of movement intellectuals
writing for it (16 per cent since the magazine's founding in 1984). These
include prominent figures from the British anarchist movement such as
Colin Ward, Donald Rooum and Peter Cadogan, though these names
appear only in early issues, to be replaced in the 1990s by members of the
current wave of anarchist intellectual such as John Moore and, from the
US, Bob Black and Hakim Bey.
The lack of established intellectuals in social movement media should
come as no surprise. Eyerman and Jamison affirm that there is a signifi-
cant place for the 'nonestablished intellectual' and go on to identify three
types: the counter-expert, the grassroots engineer and the public educa-
tor (1991: 104-106). It is arguable that Colin Ward falls into at least the
first and the second category, being known as much for his radical, 'coun-
terexpert' views on social housing as he is for his commitment to writing
with the 'common reader' in mind. The members of professional groups
writing in Squall (lawyers, information managers) and those representing
advocacy or pressure groups can also be considered as members of one
or other category of unestablished intellectual. However, such contribu-
tions are infrequent. Squall can hardly be said to rely on such people as
main contributors, except where the organization is less a bureaucracy
and more an activist-run organization (such as the Advisory Service for
Squatters).
The writers and editors of sustainable technology magazines such as
Clean Slate are 'grassroots engineers'. Those interested in disseminating
information on ecotage and monkeywrenching (the disabling of, for
example earth-moving equipment on road construction sites) might be
similarly defined. All are, to use Edward Said's term, 'amateur' or 'criti-
cal intellectuals' (Said, 1994): we might call them 'activist intellectuals'.
In Do or Die these are mostly from the US, where Earth First! was
founded, and include Judi Bari, whose article on 'the feminization of
Earth First!' is reprinted from the American Earth First! Journal in the
second issue of Do or Die. The US journal is used elsewhere in Do or Die
as a source of reprints and its status as an intellectual repository for the
movement is unchallenged: no other magazine or newspaper has its arti-
cles reprinted in Do or Die (though an article is sometimes developed
from one in another publication). The 'activist intellectual' appears
briefly elsewhere: a communique from the Zapatistas is printed in issue 4.
The Zapatistas were the peasant guerrilla movement (most of them
Indians, but with the support of urban intellectuals such as their
spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos) active in the Mexico of the 1990s,
who had endured expulsion from their native lands in the Mexican state
 W R I T ERS, REA D ER SAN D K NOW LED GEl 07

of Chiapas, as well as forced resettlement and the gradual erosion of

their legal rights since the early 1970s. They take their name from
Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary champion of landless peas-
ants at the turn of the last century. Their work has been reprinted in
numerous anarchist and class struggle publications. An article by John
Zerzan, radical primitivist philosopher, is reprinted in issue 5. Perhaps
the only unarguable intellectual 'pure and simple' whose work appears in
the magazine is Proudhon: a brief extract from his writing on govern-
ment appears in issue 3. A small number certainly, yet they attest to an
acceptance - however slight, in Do or Die's estimation - of the role of the
intellectual in activist politics.
Eyerman and Jamison note how in the 1960s unestablished intellectu-
als emerged from within the student body itself and that these individu-
als took the place of intellectuals coming from outside the struggle. Here
the movement intellectual becomes more of a 'facilitator, interpreter, and
synthesiser, rather than ideological leader' (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991:
116); 'individuals without formal training and credentials' were thus
enabled to 'have the opportunity to learn new skills and to practice them'
(p. 119). In the media of contemporary radical environmentalism and
anarchism this category of intellectual is pre-eminent. The bulk of the
writing in Squall was done by its editorial collective who, though some
have gone on take night classes in journalism, began as activists - and
emphatically remain so. At its height, in Squall 11, there were nine collec-
tive members writing under their own names, three of whom contributed
more than one article: Andy Johnson, Sam Beale and Jim Carey con-
tributed four, three and three articles respectively to this issue.
A far smaller number of articles were written by activists who are not
part of the collective. These include Kit Nash, 'a squatting activist' (writ-
ing in Squall, 9); Patrick Field, a cycling activist involved in the Critical
Mass demonstrations (also Squall, 9); Catherine Grivas, who provides 'a
personal account' of the eviction of protesters from Stanworth Valley in
Lancashire, the proposed site of the M65 (Squall, 10); Jason Royce, who
'lived at the Fairmile road protest camp' in Devon (Squall, 14); and
'Johnny Minor', one of 60 activists who entered the garden of Michael
Heseltine (then President of the Board of Trade) to protest against open
cast mining (Squall, 11). Others have written articles while in prison for
their actions: animal rights activist Keith Mann (Squall, 12) and Andrea
Needham, one of four women who disabled a Hawk aircraft in a protest
against arms sales to Indonesia (Squall, 13).
Whilst the anonymity and pseudonymity of almost all the articles in Do
or Die mean it is difficult to make any detailed claims about individual
authors, from an interview with one of its editors and from internal
108 A LT ERN A T I V E M E0 IA

evidence in editorials and the articles themselves it is clear that the majority
of the articles are written by activists. Articles written by the editorial
collective show no discernible move towards attribution: the number of
such articles fluctuates from issue to issue (seven, three, seven, four and
13 articles respectively in its first five issues); none are attributed to any
single member of the collective. The 'Action updates' (sometimes called
'Regional reports') take up an increasing amount of space. These are at
the heart of Do or Die's function as a magazine providing news and infor-
mation to members of Earth First!, since they document the latest actions
undertaken by Earth First! groups around the country (a further section,
'Other islands', does the same for other countries). They are always credi-
ted to a regional or local group (for example, South Downs Earth First!)
rather than to individuals, and should therefore be considered as anony-
mous collective products of those groups.
These reports are produced by activists. For instance, Do or Die claims
that its fifth issue was written by over 60 activists. In this light, the rela-
tively small number of reports from identifiable individuals need not be
seen as limiting the opportunities for activists to have their voices heard.
Roughly half of these in any issue are named individuals from Earth First!
groups, but typically they provide only their first names (Phil of
Merseyside EF!, 'Slippery' Steve of North Downs EF!) or pseudonyms
('Rabbix' of the 'Vegan Retribution Squad', 'Boudicca' and 'Snufkin' of
Camelot EF!). Only eight writers offer their full names. Of these, four
write from overseas, one from prison in the UK (HMP Holloway) and
one as a member of the Caledonian Green Circle. Only two activists from
Earth First! give their full names (George Marshall of Oxford EF! and
Lesley de Railiver of Upper Nene EF!). The preference for keeping one's
identity either hidden (whether under a collective identity or under a
pseudonym) or only partially revealed is understandable in a movement
where many have been arrested for criminal offences. Earth First!'s
explicit espousal of sabotage of machinery and destruction of property
makes the movement careful about revealing too much about its opera-
tions and its members.
In the case of SchNEWS the collective and anonymous approach to
editing and writing obscures these different categories further, resulting
in a collective activist-intellectual enterprise. Developing Eyerman and
Jamison's flexible concept of knowledge production, we might also
consider the participatory and collective forms of organization adopted
by many social movement media as extensions of activist-intellectual
activity. (Perhaps anonymity and pseudonymity, despite their obvious
value to activists involved in illegal acts, also continue the Enlightenment
notion of rational truth and demonstrate a concern with promoting
 W R I T ER5, REA D ER5 AND K NOW LED GEl 09

anti-individualism and a democracy of the intellect.) This is supported

by Eyerman and Jamison's argument that the work of activists is to be
considered knowledge ~roduction 'because through their activism they
contribute to the formation of the movement's collective identity' (1991:
94); in social movements 'knowledge creation [is] a collective process'
(p. 57), a process that articulates with the collective action typical of new
social movement activity.
SchNEWS claims that 'attributing articles would be an impossibility'
('SchNEWS - As It Is', SchNEWS Reader, 1996) and prints no bylines to
any of its stories. The given names of three regular (at least, for the pre-
sent) writers and editors are known from interviews: Cheryl (Zobel),
Warren and Peter. Of these three, only Zobel has any professional train-
ing in journalism, but she still considers herself primarily as an activist.
This self-definition is shared by the other two and by everyone else who
is involved in SchNEWS, however temporarily (indeed, the transient
nature of their involvement often demonstrates their commitment as
activists who have decided to devote most of their time to protest, not to
reporting it). Yet this is not to exhaust the number of contributors. It is
clear from SchNEWS's promotion of training days that it wishes to
expand the numbers and range of its reporters; even without such train-
ing, potential contributors and 'informants' regularly supply news stories.
Within its first year of publication, SchNEWS was receiving 'up to forty
phone calls per day' Oay Griffiths, cited in 'SchLIVE!' SchNEWS Reader,
1996) as well as letters and faxes, giving news and mobilizing informa-
tion. SchNEWS was connected to the Internet in March 1996: since then,
an increasing number of reports have been sent to the paper via email (no
doubt due in part to SchNEWS's World Wide Web site and an email ver-
sion of the paper itself). In April 1998 this amounted to 'over 200 e-mails
a week' and a plea to potential contributors 'to send a very short story'
(from the header to the email version of SchNEWS, 164, 24 April 1998).
Ultimately, though, the number and nature of contributors is impossible to
identify, since all such contributions are inevitably transformed by the
writing and editing of the editorial collective.
In Green Anarchist, editorial contributions comprise 25 per cent of the
total articles in the magazine. Such a large percentage should come as
no surprise; after all, it is the editorial group who have developed the
manifesto of green anarchism through its editorials and features. The
three-part manifesto 'Where We Stand' in GA 2 was the work of Albon
and Hunt. As the person behind the magazine's economic philosophy,
Hunt was the most prolific of the three, contributing many articles on
economics, class and the Third World right up to his departure. Paul
Rogers began contributing significantly upon becoming a member of the
110 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

editorial collective in 1988 (he had been writing letters and short articles
for a couple of years before this). In contrast to Hunt, he does not seek to
develop 'the party line'. His work includes criticisms of Green Anarchist's
aims, as well as interviews with other groups, such as the Legalise
Cannabis Campaign and Earth First!. In the 1990s, the anonymity of
many of the editorial group and the use of pseudonyms made identifica-
tion more difficult. Recurring names include Rabid Eigol (an anagram of
Logie Baird) writing on the media and 'Rob a.k.a. Arthur Mix'.
As if in spite of the editorial hierarchy, from its earliest issues Green
Anarchist solicited three types of contributions from its readers: the tra-
ditionalletters to the editor, the 'designed page' and articles for 'themed
issues', otherwise known as 'the core'. There is no indication of how
many readers' letters the magazine received, nor how many of these were
published, until 1991. In GA 26 (Spring 1991: 18), presenting three
pages of letters, the magazine simply states that 'we print all letters
received'. Given that the magazine's open policy on other contributions
from readers had been in existence since its earliest days, I assume that a
similar policy on letters was also in operation long before this announce-
ment. One reader at least saw the benefits in 1989, being 'impressed by
[the] unbiased views and [the] ability to publish letters slagging [the
magazine] off' (GA 22, Late Summer/Autumn 1989).
The 'designed page' is the most radical form of readers' contribution
(yet the most short-lived). A little over a year after its founding, Green
Anarchist exhorted its readers to 'design a page!'. 'Say what you think
needs to be said. Type it. Write it. Illustrate it and send us the complete
camera-ready page.' The request asks for 'plenty of reading matter in it'
as well as 'a striking design' (GA 8, September/October 1985: 2). The edi-
tors would have no control over the content or layout of that page (save
to reject it completely, though there is no evidence that they did). The
first such page appears in the same issue, extolling the value of art in
anarchy. The next issue includes two such pages (an illustrated account of
police harassment at an anti-apartheid rally in London and a more reflec-
tive piece titled 'Don't Let Green Die'). Other examples are information
about the Legalise Cannabis Campaign in GA 16, and the 'psychedelic
thoughts of a green anarchist' in GA 17. The designed page appears less
frequently in the late 1980s, its significance apparently dwindling in the
face of the decentralization that saw many more readers taking an active
part in all aspects of the magazine.
The themed issue gives the reader much more scope for contribution.
Given only the title of a forthcoming theme ('The follies of science',
'Anarchy and culture', 'Women and men'), readers were encouraged
to contribute articles of under 500 words. These would be reproduced
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE III

verbatim as part of a larger feature (at times, in pre-tabloid issues, the

reproduction was literal, the author's typescript being pasted directly
onto the page). Readers have frequently been encouraged to contribute,
even during Hunt's control of the magazine. GA 22 (Late Summer/
Autumn 1989) calls for articles on 'Anarchy and Culture'; GA 26 (Spring
1991) for articles for a critique of the Green Party. Such requests con-
tinue to the present and had great success in the 1990s. GA 42 (Summer
1996) celebrates the volume of readers' contributions to that issue's
'technocracy is tyranny' theme: 'The brill response to our appeal for copy
last issue means that we've got enough to continue this theme into the
next [issue].' Letters apart, the contribution of readers to the magazine is
high, at 46 per cent. Most of this comprises themed contributions which
continue to be a significant proportion of each issue.
There is a difference in content between these contributions and those
submitted by readers to a magazine such as Do or Die. Rather than the
first-person, activist accounts found in the latter, readers' contributions
to themed issues of Green Anarchist tend to deal with the philosophy and
theory of (green) anarchism; often they are simply readers' opinions on
the chosen topic. Though such perspectives are not explicitly recom-
mended by the editorial group, its choice of topics does encourage less
practical and tactical writing: 'The collusion of state and industry', 'The
green and black economy', 'Primitivism' and 'Anti-ideology'. (Though
there has been a 'double core' issue dealing with strategy and tactics and
'survival scams', as if to redress the balance.)
All four titles have found different ways of admitting a diversity of
voices into their pages. The admittance of the reader-writer into the same
part of a publication as that of the movement intellectual (that is, the
reader-writer who is not relegated to the letters page), offers a challenge
to intellectual discourse as well as the opportunity to discuss the ideas in
that discourse to an extent unknown in the mainstream media. Such a
strategy not only introduces new forms of knowledge from a much wider
writing base (so to speak), it also introduces many more social actors, and
offers them the same empowerment as it offers the intellectual: an equal
platform for their ideas (whether the ideas are equal is another matter).
In this way, the 'hierarchy of access' (Glasgow University Media Group,
1976: 245) normally found in the media - where an elite of experts and
pundits tends to have easier and more substantial access to a platform for
their ideas than dissidents or protesters - is subverted, even inverted. The
notion of writing for the media is transformed into an egalitarian,
devolved communicational tool for theory and for action.
The 'activist-writer' is the other significant additional social actor
empowered through the alternative media and is especially conspicuous
112 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

in SchNEWS, where activism seems more important for membership of

the editorial collective than a proven ability to write. Involvement as a
writer can only come with being an active participant in the entire
process of reporting, writing, editing and production. Similarly, whilst
Do or Die, SchNEWS and Squall recognize the importance of encourag-
ing or training potential writers, they are primarily interested in what
these writers have to say from their perspective as activists. Dealing with
events and actions, their contributions superficially resemble eyewitness
reports in the mainstream press. Rather than marginalize them as the
contributions of 'mere readers', it is profitable to consider these as radi-
cal forms of reporting, what I shall call 'native-reporting'.

Conceptualizing Alternative News

as 'Native Reporting'

'Native reporting' can usefully define the activities of alternative journal-

ists working within communities of interest to present news that is rele-
vant to those communities' interests, in a manner that is meaningful to
them and with their collaboration and support. SchNEWS has similarly
termed its contributors 'activist-reporters' and 'native-journalists',
though it has provided no further comment on how it understands these
terms. The origins of the latter term lie, however, in mainstream journal-
ism. It was coined by Robert Chesshyre to describe his return to Britain
following his posting as the Observer's Washington correspondent
(Chesshyre, 1987: 13): 'coming home, one had to learn again the native
idiom'. For Chesshyre, this meant relearning a method of reporting about
local, everyday 'situations with which readers can personally identify'
(p. 31). He observes how such reports inevitably draw many letters from
readers:
who have something to say and want to join in .... They know more than
their masters do of what it is like to have a child in a comprehensive school,
or to be unemployed, to try to start a business. They are the reliable
witnesses. (1987: 31-32)

However reliable those witnesses, in the forum of mainstream journal-

ism they still need their Robert Chesshyres (and their John Pilgers) to
argue on their behalf. And however powerful their arguments might be,
such professional journalists are firmly within the advocacy tradition,
mediating on behalf of those whose lives they understand - perhaps very
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE 113

well. But 'native-reporter' also evokes those local grassroots journalists of

the South by whom Michael Traber sets so much store, whose value lies
not in their role as message-creators for a passive audience, but as
members of a community whose work enables the entire community to
come together, to 'analyse one's historical situation, which transforms
consciousness, and leads to the will to change a situation' (Traber, 1985:" 3).
The experience of colonialism is not far from here, in particular its legacy
of 'dualism': 'a dual culture, a dual economy and a dual polity' (ibid.). In
all these instances, and in particular in relation to the media, this duality
is expressed by 'participation and alienation'. Local communities under
colonialism found themselves unable to participate in the media that
ostensibly reported on matters of concern to them; they were alienated
from the methods of production as well as from the nature of the report-
ing. They were not involved in the media, either as creators of stories or
as actors within them. Instead there was the colonizing journalist,
described by David Spurr as 'placed either above or at the centre of
things, yet apart from them' (Spurr, 1993: 16). Spurr argues that the
power relations inherent in this relationship between observer and
observed are grounded by standard narrative practices in journalism that,
by adopting these perspectives, 'obviate the demand for concrete, practical
action on the part of its audience' (p. 45). By contrast, native reporters
are at the centre of things as participants, and their work is precisely to
feed discussion and debate from the perspective of the colonized and,
crucially, to provide 'information for action'.
How native reporting situates activists in both the texts they produce
and in the sociopolitical contexts in which they place them (and are
themselves placed) can be shown by the following example taken from a
feature in the video magazine Undercurrents. Undercurrents was espe-
cially interested in promoting what one of its founders calls 'witness
video' (Harding, 1997: 1) and in encouraging 'activist editing' (p. 148) -
an interest in politicizing programmes through subjective testimony,
often by the subjects representing themselves. In the opening moments
of the news feature 'New Labour, New Arms' (Undercurrents, 8, December
1997), the activist reporter 'J en' presents herself conventionally enough
along mainstream lines. She is apart from the action, whether in front of
an Air Training Corps building, outside the Labour Party conference, or
at times as a voice-over ('above' the action). Her introduction has nothing
of the testimonial at this point. As the report develops, however, Jen's
identity as an activist becomes clearer - critical comment becomes more
frequent (Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's address to his party's confer-
ence is 'just a pacifying speech'; 'I just don't think that it's good enough').
During her brief, backstage interview with Cook she infracts more
114 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

reporting rules: the interview is unplanned, opportunist. Cook is caught

on camera hurrying a sandwich before turning to speak. Jen's nervousness
is apparent. After Cook's departure, her to-camera remarks are candidly
personal, perhaps naIve ('he seemed human - he was eating a sandwich';
'I would have liked longer to talk with him').
Her comments situate her as a non-professional reporter, reacting
ordinarily and spontaneously much as her audience might do in a similar
situation: a little overawed, nervous, yet committed to criticism and action.
There is a strong sense of the quotidian here. An epilogue to the feature
constructs two scenes that emphasize the everyday nature of activism.
The first depicts Jen at her breakfast table, reading a newspaper. Though
clearly rehearsed, her testimony to camera is sincere enough; she is
responding to a statement by Cook that appears to contradict his ethical
foreign policy ('I can't quite believe my eyes'; 'blatant hypocrisy'). We cut
to the final scene where Jen is perched on a high wall overlooking an
arms factory. She is filmed through barbed wire. The shift from domestic
to military is shocking, yet logical: her message is 'Go down to your local
arms factory and take direct action.' In a little over seven minutes Jen
moves from conventional reporter to activist, throughout representing
herself not as a simple professional, not even as a simple activist, but as a
vulnerable, brave individual, situated in the everyday yet capable of
remarkable actions, whether interviewing a senior politician or taking
direct action against the military-industrial complex. She is oppressed
and activist; witness and critic. Her words and actions are, in the end,
those of her audience, her movement through identities and relationships
in this brief feature as complex as any in everyday life.
Such a performance accrues further power through 'underproduction':

Keep those long shots. Don't worry if it's a bit wobbly; it will feel more
authentic. In general, turn your weaknesses (few resources, little experience)
to an advantage by keeping your feature simple but powerful. (Harding,
1997: 149)

In her study of AIDS video activism, Alexandra Juhasz (1995) argues for
the employment of mainstream media forms such as the documentary to
claim authority over the radical content of a programme, content that
would never be thus presented through mainstream channels. Like
Harding, she emphasizes production processes that involve members of
the communities for which (and in which) the video is being produced:
'Alternative AIDS media ... actively situates itself within the object of
study ... to look is to see and know yourself, not the other - an entirely
different route to pleasure and power' Ouhasz, 1995: 138; emphasis in
original).
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE 115

Reading 'native reporter' in a colonial sense declares that the news

gathered and presented by such reporters as part of their own lives is not
catered for by the colonial power wielded by mainstream reporters, nor
have their issues been taken over by these 'invaders'. Native reporters
seek to take back what is 'their' news, just as the grassroots journalism
that Michael Traber discusses seeks to empower local people in Latin
America, India and Mrica. This second interpretation is perhaps more
powerful than Chesshyre's, since it suggests the actualization of his 'reli-
able witnesses' as recorders of their own reality, empowered as participa-
tors in the very construction of their own media as resistance to
colonialism. Here I do not want to force an exact correspondence
between the power relations of the colonizer and the colonized and those
between the mainstream and alternative media; I simply want to show
that a comparison is instructive. The native reporter as construed in the
alternative press is Other, what Spurr has his colonizing journalist call
'the antithesis of civilized value' (1993: 7). This highlights a struggle
within the politics of representation, a 'politics of struggle and power in
the everyday world', to use Edward Said's phrase (Said, 1982/1985: 147),
where the native reporter gains self-respect and moral and political
strength through self-representation, thereby drawing power away from
the mainstream back to the disenfranchised and marginalized groups that
are the native reporter's proper community.
Native reporting can also be seen at the heart of local community
media. The radical local press of the 1970s in the UK was concerned with
'the production of revelatory news' (Franklin and Murphy, 1991: 106)
that directly affected the lives of working people in their communities.
The non-aligned nature of these presses encouraged reporters to investi-
gate all political parties equally, with no restriction of political allegiance.
Where such allegiance was observable it was not at party level, but at
grassroots level; many radical papers sought support from local Labour
Party and trade union activists, though this did not prevent investigation
of the senior members of these organizations. Broadly speaking, this rad-
ical press ·was interested in promulgating left-wing views, as Franklin and
Murphy assert, but it was far from the propagandist approach of the
Party newspapers that Colin Sparks (1985) terms the working-class press.
Where the alternative local press did acknowledge its propaganda value
was in presenting its practices of media production as propaganda of the
deed, a sociopolitical argument deriving from reflections similar to those
presented by Duncombe in his exploration of Benjamin's duality of posi-
tion and attitude, as presented in Chapter 1.
'Breaking two sorts of silences' is how Franklin and Murphy (1991: 113)
sum up the project of the radical local press. The first silence - of elite
116 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

groups on corruption within their ranks - is broken by investigative

and revelatory news reporting. From the breaking of the second silence
springs a recognition that such news is not merely there to titillate or to
sell papers: it is there as an instance of news that is relevant to the lives
of ordinary, unprivileged people. Breaking this second silence is about
giving voice to those people, about reporting news from their perspec-
tive, presenting stories where they are the main actors, where they are
permitted to speak with authority, as counters to the mainstream's regu-
larized interest in public figures as the only authoritative voices, the pre-
dominant sources of 'validating information'. Through the radical local
press of the 1970s it was revealed to readers and writers alike that all
news was socially constructed. Whereas the mainstream local media
privileged news constructed from the perspective of those in positions of
authority, the radical local press constructed its news from the perspec-
tive of those of low status, producing what have been termed 'parish
magazines of the dispossessed' (Harcup, 1994: 3). And in answer to
Tony Harcup's question: 'Whose news is it anyway?' (Harcup, 1998:
105) we might answer: 'Their news.' Local people would not only
become primary sources and major interviewees in stories, they could
also become news-gatherers. Reporters would build up networks of local
people - not only political activists, but local residents' groups, parents,
workers, the unemployed, the homeless - and encourage them to supply
leads for stories.
'We might also consider the alternative news sources in Northern
Ireland produced within the Republican community. As David Miller
(1994: 215) demonstrates, such sources as the weekly republican paper
An Phoblacht/Republican News and the nationalist weekly Anderson-
stown News were and continue to be key sources. The majority (eight out
of ten) in the group of nationalist residents in West Belfast taking part in
Miller's examination of mainstream news values in the coverage of the
Gibraltar shootings of 1988 cited such alternative media as part of their
sources of news. Here we find a redefining of community media as agents
of national identity, where political communities seek valorization of
their identity, community and political strength through the production
of their own media. Miller has shown how, following then Secretary of
State for Northern Ireland Roy Mason's attempt to close down
Republican News in 1978, the Republican Press Centre and Republican
News became more 'overground', their editors and workers taking more
visible roles in political media production (1994: 85). Liz Curtis (1984)
examines An Phoblacht/Republican News in terms of its significance as
the major engine of Republican publicity. Far from the massive propa-
ganda machine alluded to by much British journalism, she finds an
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE 117

operation that has much in common with the economic and cultural
characteristics of the alternative media under discussion in this book:
ramshackle, squatted premises, extremely limited resources (the acquisi-
tion of a hired telex machine in 1974 was a major leap forward for the
Republican Press Centre in West Belfast), 'underground' printing, hole-
and-corner publishing, on occasion producing single-page emergency
editions 'on the run'. There was little or no subsidy, yet there remained
space for innovation: the hunger strikes of 1980-81 saw the production
of the first Republican video, which was shown in community centres
throughout the province. This period also saw an increase in the range of
materials produced: posters, badges and pamphlets -largely for local use -
which supplemented the weekly newspaper. (A similar situation might be
outlined for the Unionist media.) 1
Other types of community media might also be seen as comprising
'native reporting', though these often appear to have little interest in
political activism of any kind. A first broad group would include the
web-based network of community reporters established under the aegis
of Steve Thompson at the University of Teesside. These initiatives
involve a high proportion of local, non-professional people in their
news-gathering, reporting and production - the Newcastle Community
News website (www.ncn.org.uk/) boasts a youngest writer of only eight
years. There is little interest here in courting controversy. Instead we
find the promotion of more neutral, 'universal' values of local commu-
nities. History, in the form of recollection and reminiscence, is encour-
aged: much of the reporting in these web sites is to do with the
preservation of tradition, with community journalism as the practice of
a demotic local history. Other initiatives resemble more closely the
alternative community newspapers of the 1970s. Grimethorpe's
Electronic Village Hall and London's Tower Hamlets Community
Network E-base seek to make Internet technology accessible to local
communities in order to assist in the regeneration of economically
deprived areas. These can directly benefit local economies by enabling
small businesses to access e-commerce. They also offer access to
Internet resources to enable campaigning on social issues such as hous-
ing through networking with similar organizations, holding discussions
on-line, communicating with local officials, and publicizing causes and
issues. As Christopher Mele (1999: 292) has found in the case of a
North Carolina residents' group, the technology enables members of a
community to 'operate as agents outside the local and exclusive path-
ways of information, social discourse and social action that were either
controlled or influenced by the institution of the housing authority or
other local elite groups'.
118 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

Radical Populism and Language

Peter Golding (1999: 51) has argued that the 'demotic and casually
convivial tone of the popular press [is itself] rooted in the evolution of
a journalism of the market from a more socially anchored journalism of
community or movement'. Here he is drawing on Raymond Williams's
(1970: 21) argument from history that the English Radical press
employed colloquial language 'with colour, vitality and force; very often
without the restraints and qualifications of highly educated writing'.
This style was exploited by the commercial popular press to mask a very
different social voice, so that a paper with a very different model of
'ownership and political opinion [has] been made to sound popular'
(ibid.). Far from subscribing to this latter, reactionary and disempower-
ing model of spectacular consumption (in its recent manifestation as
tabloid journalism) that claims to represent the majority of people, the
grassroots alternative media are returning to the source of the model
and rediscovering a popular discourse that is grounded in popular writ-
ing for social action. It is tempting to go further, arguing that the tabloid
newspapers' values are the aberration from a press that was historically
and socially grounded in the struggles of ordinary people. The Radical
press should be considered the central form of democratic media, with
subsequent dilutions such as the tabloid press as 'marginal' in democra-
tic terms.
This offers an instructive complement to the argument made by
Theodore Glasser (1974) in his evaluation of the language used by the
American underground press. He found that, rather than employing an
inclusive language that encouraged a wide audience, the underground press
'resorted to the use of a modified and self-limiting language, one that was
unintelligible to a great many in their potential audience' (1974: 201).
Whether we attribute this to its (arguable) origins as a language of 'drug
addicts and criminals' or consider it as a strategy to exclude the older
generation (specifically parents), it is far removed culturally and his-
torically from the populist Radical press and its successors. Elsewhere we
can find examples of alternative media that consciously draw on populist
forms of address and presentation at the same time as they subvert those
forms for the. purposes of political consciousness-raising and mobiliza-
tion. The British anarchist newspaper Class War (published by the Class
War Federation in the 1980s and 1990s as 'Britain's most unruly tabloid')
drew on the common style of the tabloid press by producing news arti-
cles and features that were irreverent and often humorous, all couched
in a language of self-righteous anger and moral certainty familiar to us
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE 119

from papers such as The Sun. The Class War Federation has explicitly
acknowledged its debt:

There is a reason why people like to read The Sun. It's not because they're
ignorant, it's because a lot of the time all you want is a light entertaining
read... there is a lot to be said for a paper that is simple, entertaining and
easy to read, and that's what Class War should be like if we want people to
read it. (Class War Federation, 1991: 18)

To this end, in common with many tabloid newspapers, Class War

employed what Norman Fairclough (1995: 72) has termed a 'public-
colloquial' style of discourse, a hybrid style that is able to function both
interpersonally (solidarity is formed between paper and audience through
a shared, non-intellectual, non-specialist style) and ideationally. In a
paper like The Sun this entails the transformation of official discourse
into a colloquial setting; in the case of Class War it means representing
anarchist positions on class colloquially. In both, as Hall et al. (1978: 61
and cited in Fairclough, 1995: 71) have shown, this not only makes the
viewpoints more widely available to a larger, 'uninitiated' public, it also
'invests them with popular force and resonance, naturalizing them within
the horizon of understanding of the various publics'. But Class War is
hardly interested in using the mainstream press as a political model; its
borrowings of language, stylistic devices and modes of address typically
subvert tabloid conventions through irony or sarcasm (at the same time
subverting their political modalities). Its long-running 'hospitalized copper'
photo-feature subverted the common appeal made to tabloid readers to
join together in condemning violence against police officers, in empathiz-
ing with their families and in assessing such violence as symptomatic of
political hooliganism. By contrast the 'hospitalized copper' series revels
in such violence, encouraging its audience to support it as emblematic of
violence against the state and as symptomatic of successful class struggle.
Similarly, where the tabloid press often promotes ordinary people as vigi-
lantes, taking the law into their own hands against criminals (or alleged
criminals), Class War 'feature[s] people fighting back in the paper to show
that it happens all the time ... giving people the confidence they need to
take o~ capitalism and the State' (Class War Federation, 1991: 19).
Whilst this fighting is real enough (often resulting in the 'hospitalized
copper') its tactics are to refer ironically to the tabloid language from
which the Class War Federation hopes to draw much of its popular
strength: the label 'Rentamob', used by the tabloid press to refer to a
stage-managed, typically left-wing group of 'troublemakers' (van Dijk,
1991) is used by the Federation to refer to its own members - a group of
Class War supporters is photographed carrying a banner emblazoned with
120 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

'Class War - Rentamob - On Tour' (Class War, 73 Summer 1997: 8).

Here an expression of moral outrage is ironically reversed and trans-
formed into a celebration of demotic power.
Perhaps my choice of example is an extreme one - I certainly do not
intend Class War to be taken as the ideal or only model for such trans-
formation. Seen though, alongside other forms such as those found in
Undercurrents and in the colloquial and irreverent forms of address used
by SchNEWS, we see how a radical, popular journalism may be recovered
from an aberrant, populist form in the mainstream tabloid press.

Activists as Intellectuals

Let us now return to the notion of 'activist intellectual' we met earlier.

Are we to ascribe the term 'activist intellectual' to anyone who has ever
written anything - however slight - for the radical media, or who has
ever pasted up a page of that same publication? Whilst Eyerman and
Jamison assert that 'most activists are movement intellectuals in one form
or another and at one time or another' (1991: 106), they argue that this
dissolution of categories is succeeded by the full professionalization of
movement intellectuals. As evidence they cite the evolution of the British
environmental social movement in the 1970s into hierarchical social
movement organizations (SMOs) such as Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace, each with its own professional intellectuals established
within the organization.
The frequent use of anonymity and pseudonymity in new social move-
ment media suggests an aversion to the professionalization of intellectual
activity based on personality and reputation. There are few signs that this
democratization of intellectual activity is about to be succeeded by intel-
lectual professionalization. In the direct-action networks of the 1990s
there was no move towards the status of SMa; indeed, it is contrary to
the principles of DIY culture that such a shift should occur. (Retaining
such activity within the movements themselves is emphasized by Jim
Carey's (1998: 63) proposal that better than 'DIY culture' we should call
it 'DiO culture' - Do it Ourselves.) Far from intellectual activity being
promoted within the new social movements, there is much scepticism of
it. Thinking and writing about activism usually trail a poor second to the
practice of activism. SchNEWS declares that 'it's all about participation
and activism', that writing and publishing are only part of the picture;
to complete it 'you have to go out and see it for yourself' (from my
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE 121

interview with Warren). An editorial in Squall declares that it is 'written

and produced by people who live the issues, not observers looking for a
commission' (,It's Still Serious', Squall, 7, Summer 1994: 2).
Does a culture where intellectual activity is of so little value not render
'movement intellectual' and 'activist intellectual' mere analytical cate-
gories to be employed by researchers alone? Are they as empty as that? I
believe they are not. Such low status is not borne out by an examination
of the content of the radical media. The negative comments on writing
made by the editors of Do or Die must be balanced against their careful
request for articles to be submitted according to certain criteria outlined
in an editorial in their second issue. Whilst these highlight the notion of
'information for action' ('articles should empower people to do some-
thing') they also stress the value of references. Moreover, an examination
of the content of articles in Do or Die finds that a significant amount are
emphatically products of movement-intellectual activity and correspond
well with Eyerman and Jamison's assertion that the role of the movement
intellectual 'is that of providing a larger framework of meaning in which
individual and collective actions can be understood' (1991: 115) and that
of 'drawing out and helping to make conscious the core identity of a
social movement' (Eyerman, 1994: 199).

Examples of Knowledge Production

In Do or Die issue 5 (1996) a 4,OOO-word article presents major theories

of biodiversity loss in island populations and suggests differing types of
action to combat such loss required by SMOs such as Friends of the Earth
and Greenpeace and grassroots groups such as Earth First!. The article,
whilst anonymous (as are all the articles in this issue bar one) has the style
of many an undergraduate essay in its blend of personal opinion and
secondary research, of colloquial first person and scholarly quotation. A
further anonymous article, on the radical cyclists' movement Critical
Mass, examines the philosophy of that movement, its history, strategy and
tactics, and addresses the notion of how the movement is able to 'build
community' amongst its members and supporters. The only attributed
article, written by Martin Miriori of the Bougainville Interim Peace Office,
discusses Bougainville in the Solomon Islands and examines the islanders'
demands for political self-determination in the face of continuing eco-
nomic exploitation. (The island was placed under colonial rule first by
Germany from 1899, then by Australia as part of its territory of Papua
 122 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

from 1919. Even when Papua New Guinea gained its independence from
Australia in 1975, Bougainville remained under Papuan administration.)
Perhaps the most politically astute article - in terms of an understand-
ing of the tensions that can arise between political groupings involved in
a campaign - is 'Shoreham - Live Exports and Community Defence',
which examines the strategies and tactics employed during the protests
against live exports at the port of Shoreham, on England's south coast.
This is not simply a description of the protests, but an account of com-,
munity organization that is critical of the involvement of media celebri-
ties and highlights contradictions in community struggles. It alleges
aloofness from the protest by 'Brighton politicos' and is especially criti-
cal of the Socialist Workers' Party's (SWP) 'workerist' philosophy that
prevented the party from 'connect[ing] to Shoreham'. Scepticism about
organized left-wing parties and Trotskyites in particular appears through-
, out the radical environmental and anarchist movement media: a group
calling itself Trotwatch has produced an irregular magazine and pam-
phlets dedicated to such critical work. Whilst some publications - notably
Aufheben and Counter Information - do take a class-struggle perspective
on activism, there is a general lack of interest in class (as George McKay,
1998, has also noted). The article is sensitive to differences in such
groups, however - its author writes favourably of members of Militant,
because they became involved in the protest as individuals rather than as
Militant ideologues. The author is also critical of other DIY groups, in
particular of the Brighton direct-action group Justice?'s alleged inability
to connect with working people and middle-aged citizens, since the
group is primarily interested in (and drawn from) the young middle-class
unemployed. (Such a critique could also form the basis of a more funda-
mental analysis of how inclusive and participatory such groups - and
their media - really are.)
In the next issue (1997) amongst the 86 pages of feature articles (com-
pared to 33 pages in issue 5), there are lengthy pieces on Reclaim the
Streets, the Luddites, the future of Earth First! and activists' accounts of
three prominent British protests (Fairmile, Newbury and Manchester
Airport). The feature on the Reclaim the Streets (RTS) movement is in
fact three articles in one, all anonymous, totalling around 5,500 words.
It examines the political and social issues of the movement, its history
from 1991 to the present and its rationale, identifying an historical basis
for its 'street party' tactics drawn from the events of Paris in 1968. It
argues that RTS's critique of the commodification and privatization of
public spaces is based on the theoretical writings of Adorno, Debord and
Vaneigem~ 'to "reclaim the streets" is to enact the transformation of the
[road] to the [street]. In this context the anti-roads movement is also a
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE 123

struggle for the human-scale, the face-to-face, for a society in harmony

with its natural surrounding.' The article on the Luddites is a synthetic
reading of Kirkpatrick Sale and John Zerzan's writings on the Luddites
and Guy Debord's theory of spectacular society which draws implicit
parallels with British activism in the 1990s.
'Earth First! - But What Next?' notes the limits that the movement has
placed on potential activists (for instance, it requires them to be physi-
cally fit and able-bodied); it is critical of the common 'fuck you' attitude
on protests, exemplified most vividly by the hard-drinking and disruptive
element known as the 'Brew Crew'. It argues for links with a wider range
of groups, including community groups. It suggests talking to the local
Women's Institute, an interesting tactic for a group often portrayed in the
mainstream media as uncompromising and 'extreme', and encourages
involvement in local economic initiatives such as the Local Exchange
Trading Schemes (LETS). It even finds inspiration in the strategies of
SMOs, noting the success of Friends of the Earth 'who score by being
well connected, wealthy and strategic'. Finally, it recommends using and
working with other movement media (it cites Corporate Watch) to
improve education within the movements. I shall return to links between
media below.
The three activists' accounts might best be thought of as critical narra-
tives of resistance since they not only recount the experiences of protest-
ing but critically engage in its successes, failures and contradictions.
Though admitting that it is 'not intended as any kind of history or analy-
sis', the anonymous account of the protest against the Newbury bypass
reinforces many of the points made in the earlier critique of Earth First!.
Similarly, the account of the road protest at Fairmile addresses problems
of elitism, questions of function, media coverage and future strategies for
similar protests. The final account - of the protest against the building of
Manchester Airport's second runway - also offers a critical account of
'Brew Crew culture' and notes the lack of strategic planning in many
protests: 'there's a lot to be said for thinking, planning - rather than just
throwing yourself into the first idea that comes into your head ... tactical
thinking'.
These two issues of Do or Die present an eclectic set of articles that
variously combine twentieth-century cultural and radical philosophy, cri-
tiques of activism, historical parallels for contemporary activism, economic
and political critiques, self- and movement analyses and accounts of ecol-
ogy. The length and detail of the articles suggest a commitment from their
authors to intellectual activity. The range of approaches, sources, inspira-
tion and theories does, however, raise some questions. Does the writing
comprise a coherent philosophy for Earth First!? Is it expected to? Is a
124 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

co-ordinated approach to movement-intellectual actIvIty necessary in a

non-hierarchical, participatory network of protest? Co-editor Dom's
notion of the magazine as 'a grab-bag ... to give people a sense of possibil-
ities' does not address how these possibilities might come together as a
coherent knowledge base for the movement, nor is there any acknowl-
edgement that such a 'grab-bag' might well lead to incoherence.
Whereas Do or Die has attained high professional standards in proof-
reading and reproduction, the reader coming to Green Anarchist for
the first time (as to many alternative publications) will immediately note
that its standards of layout and production are far from professional.
Green Anarchist began as a cheaply printed magazine with a mix of type-
written and hand-written copy originated and pasted up by the editors.
Since GA 32 (Summer 1993) it has been produced in an offset tabloid
format, yet this is no guarantee of error-free professional standards.
Columns are often misaligned and at times laid out in the wrong order;
sometimes paragraphs are absent. Typographical errors abound; illustra-
tions are frequently poorly reproduced. To the professional eye, Green
Anarchist bears all the hallmarks of a publication produced by amateurs,
and less than competent amateurs at that. Nor are such failings only of
aesthetic importance: a letter in GA 51 (Summer 1998) from Michael
William, the author of a piece on Quebec in GA 47-48, points out that
several literals in the typesetting of his article significantly altered the
sense of the piece; most notable was the confusion between 'francoph-
one' and 'francophobe'. William also draws our attention to the fact that
the magazine received his article as a '22-page handwritten version' and
was obliged to type it from scratch. Whilst there are those who would
argue that mistakes of the number and significance as appear in Green
Anarchist detract from its value, we should remember that it is the pro-
duct of people who are primarily activists, neither professionals nor tech-
nicians. In terms of content Green Anarchist is an odd blend of the
colloquially pragmatic (often expressed confrontationally), the densely
theoretical and at times the simply baffling. GA 51 exhibits all of these
characteristics.
The front page leads with an editorial about the Gandalf trial under a
typically confrontational headline: 'Fuck you, pigs!'. The following three
pages are taken up with the magazine's regular 'diaries': of animalliber-
ation, ecodefence and 'community resistance'. Each attempts to list all
examples of actions (both violent and peaceful) that have taken place in
support of these causes since the previous issue. 'Community resistance',
though the shortest, is the most varied. It includes food riots in Indonesia,
peace protesters in London, the 'Mardi Gras' bombings against London
supermarkets and a pro-ETA rally in Bilbao. In microcosm this list
 WRITERS, READ ER 5 AN D K NOW LED G E 125

exhibits much of the magazine's confused blend of support for terrorism,

for the oppressed and for peaceful protest. By implication, GA appears to
consider them all as manifestations of anarchism, which they clearly are
not. The feature articles that follow are divided into a number of
sections; an issue usually has one or two 'cores' (key themes). GA 51,
unusually, is a 'triple core' issue. The first deals with the Gandalf trial and
comprises pieces written by members of the editorial group. On the
second theme, 'the Unabomber trial', there are only two articles: a letter
from Ted Kaczynski (whom Green Anarchist believes was framed as the
Unabomber); and a critique of the Unabomber manifesto by John Moore.
The final theme is 'direct action', on which there are three articles: Steve
Booth's article on the 'irrationalists'; an article on 'poetic terrorism'
as direct action (actions that delight rather than destroy) and 'a crypto-
anarchist manifesto'. Whilst previous issues of Green Anarchist have dealt
with more fundamental debates in direct action (such as the future and
purpose of Earth First!), this collection seems oddly focused - whether
the last article of the three has any relevance to the others is difficult to
say. Green Anarchist seems to be moving towards a blend of theoretical
critique (Moore, Zerzan) and the (apparently indiscriminate) support of
terrorist violence.
Inevitably, Do or Die and Green Anarchist also present more pragmatic
and tactical information ('mobilizing information' or 'information for
action') as well as 'diaries' and news reports of actions and protest world-
wide (in the case of Do or Die, such information can also be found in the
Earth First! Action Update and on its web site). In these cases, knowledge
and mobilizing information appear as equal partners, exemplifying 'an
activist concept of intellectual activity, a sense that knowledge must be
put to good and better use' (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991: 116). In other
media, such as the journal Aufheben, the two are fused. Aufheben char-
acterizes itself as a 'class struggle anarchist' journal that offers 'revolu-
tionary perspectives' (according to the footer on its front cover) and
straddles the radical environmentalist and anarchist movements. It was
founded by activists who 'wanted to develop theory in order to partici-
pate more effectively' (from ~ufheben' on the Aufheben web site
lists.village.virginia.edu/--spoons/aut_html/auf1 edit.htm) and it critiques
and theorizes protests as well as the objects of protests and the tactics of
groups such as the SWP (again). Aufheben has developed its theoretical
perspective from a blend of situationism, the work of the Italian autonomia
and Marx. (The title of the journal is taken from a concept employed by
Hegel and used by the early Marx to describe the dialectical process of
supersession, through which a higher form of thought or being may
replace a lower one while retaining its 'moments of truth'.) It has its roots
126 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

in a reading group dedicated to Marx's Capital and Grundrisse and is

published 'as a contribution to the reuniting of theory and practice'. The
same aim had been attempted by the Class War Federation through its
simultaneous publication of two titles: 'Britain's most unruly tabloid'
Class War and its theoretical journal The Heavy Stuff. Before this, the
anarchist Freedom Press had for many years published alongside its long-
running newspaper, Freedom, a theoretical journal, The Raven (though
perhaps more weakly theoretical, since much of it is taken up with
commentary on mainstream topics from an anarchist perspective).
Though not set up together with the explicit aim of offering a balance
of theory and practice, the critical journal Here and Now and the class-
struggle anarchist news-sheet Counter Information are seen as comple-
mentary by Jim McFarlane, who is a member of both publications'
editorial collectives. McFarlane has written about the contradiction of
being involved in two projects, 'one [Counter Information] requiring a
certain suspension of disbelief, the other [Here and Now] rooted in skep-
ticism' ('Heresay', Here and Now, 13 [no date]: 2). He reveals a 'politi-
cal tension' in producing material that is meant to 'enthuse and inspire'
its readers into action, at the same time as producing 'semi-scholastic arti-
cles' whose politics are 'elevated' and 'less accessible'. A search for such
a tension in other media and their sociocultural contexts may well prove
useful to an understanding of the nature of their 'intellectual coherence'.

Coherence and Coverage

Publications such as Aufheben, Counter Information and those of the

Class War Federation and Freedom Press offer information and knowl-
edge from more or less ideologically determined positions. The 'grab-
bag' of Do or Die and Green Anarchist's placing of dense, theoretical texts
alongside readers' briefer, personal writings generate critical spaces
where freedom of expression is privileged over intellectual coherence
(for instance, the editors of Green Anarchist claim that they publish on a
'no platform, no censorship' basis). When these two positions are taken
together (and remembering that these represent only a fraction of the
movement media, albeit a conspicuous fraction), intellectual coherence is
unlikely. Do such media present any coherent vision or identity of a
movement? Should we expect them to cohere?
The anonymous author writing about the future of Earth First! in Do
or Die noted the value of a journal such as Corporate Watch to the
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE 127

movement. In the spirit of DIY culture this journal - an investigative and

critical journal about corporate activity world-wide - arose spontaneously.
As we have seen, outside the tighter organizational structures of the SMO,
such media develop independently and unco-ordinated (except where links
are forged latterly). An editorial in the alternative review journal Bypass
argued that decentralization 'may prove a key strategy for the survival of
dissent, or even just plain old independent thinking' (cited in Atton,
1996a: 101). Given the primacy of the network in DIY culture, can we
expect these diversely differentiated media to co-ordinate for the further-
ance of the movements? What links are maintained between media? We
have seen that some groups and movements produce two complementary
titles. In addition, many list each other's titles in a spirit of mutual support
and networking, but there is little evidence of the media actually working
together. More noticeable are the antagonisms and the rivalries. Green
Anarchist is the most vociferous in this regard and appears to have aliena-
ted itself from many other anarchist and environmental groups in the UK.
Even during the conspiracy trial in 1997 of three of its 'editors', opinion
was ambivalent towards the charges. Whilst SchNEWS was supportive,
Squall ignored the case. Tyro readers find their way through such myriad
media only with the greatest difficulty; the lack of an overarching publi-
cation and the necessity to understand the various rivalries and alliances
mean that making sense of the new social movement media is hard and
that getting access to - and assessing - their contents problematic.
Furthermore, there is a danger that some areas of knowledge will be
dealt with hardly at all. There is little discussion of gender, sexuality, race
and class, though the occasional article may be found: Green Anarchist
has published articles highly critical of feminism and articles supporting
extreme libertarian views of sexuality, some going so far as to support
paedophilia. Race tends to be discussed as a function of fascism
(SchNEWS's reports about the status of immigrants in Dover typically
focus on (white) activists' attempts to disrupt marches by the local branch
of the National Front.) The multi-racial character of the Exodus
Collective - championed at length in Squall and examined in Tim
Malyon's (1998) essay from George McKay's DIY Culture collection - is
hardly touched on by the various reporters who have written about them.
The general absence of interest in class has already been noted. There is
a danger that so many disparate theories, philosophies and strategies will
be posited that it becomes impossible for a movement to progress evenly,
especially in a culture that is (at least partially) sceptical of intellectual
activity. If there is little enough time to edit a journal between bouts of
activism, where is the time to reflect on the issues raised by the articles in
even a single issue of Do or Die or Aufheben?
128 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

Finally, we should ask: Whom do these media aim to represent? The

large numbers of activists who contribute to Do or Die and Green
Anarchist certainly have an outlet for their contributions, yet the letters
pages of both titles crackle with voices critical of these contributions.
Offering a space for discussion is no guarantor of consensus. A journal
such as Aufheben offers no such space and presents itself as the product
of a closed group. How valuable it is to the wider movements is impossi-
ble to judge from its own pages. And what of the silent voices, those of
non-contributors? Are they alienated by such diversity and dissent? How
many activists reading the movement media have no interest in large
parts of it?

Readers as Readers

A small-scale survey of SchNEWS readers (around 50 self-selected

respondents) that I undertook in 1999 suggests that most are looking for
the two commonplaces of alternative media: mobilizing information and
news of events ignored or marginalized by the mainstream media. A little
under half of the respondents claimed that they read SchNEWS for the
second reason. The assertion that issues are not covered elsewhere might
be as much an assertion of the respondent's own 'alternativeness' as an
assertion that they know that certain stories are not covered by the main-
stream media. One respondent referred to the importance of 'defiance' in
alternative media and said that, for them, that position was crucial.
Choosing to read the alternative media as an act of defiance, as a procla-
mation of alternativeness, may well underlie assertions regarding coverage.
No respondent, however, presented this as the sole reason for reading
the paper. For many respondents SchNEWS provides contacts, acts as a
directory, enabling networking amongst like-minded activists: it 'does not
merely inform, it. activates its readers' (rather, this reader values the acti-
vating potential of the paper). A Finnish reader used SchNEWS to pro-
mote DIY culture in her own country; another found in it inspiration
'for other groups to start their own SchNEWS-type news-sheet'. Of all
British alternative publications in this milieu it is the most frequent and
reliable, appearing every week in paper form, by email and on its web
site; it can be more up to date with country-wide actions and campaigns
than any other single medium (though some email discussion lists and
bulletin boards are more current in narrower fields, such as the
McSpotlight web site). Consequently it is considered of great value for
 WRITE RS, REA DE RS AND KN OW LE D G E 129

activists and potential activists alike. SchNEWS is also thought to be useful

for increasing readers' understanding of the political, social and econo-
mic issues underlying many of the reasons for protest. It is respected for
its ability to deal with 'heavy issues' in simple language, its accessibility to
readers without any sophisticated prior knowledge of the topic. Though
the range of issues covered and the space available force its writers and
editors to deal with topics in brief, this brevity is generally praised as con-
tributing to the paper's accessibility. Even within these limits readers find
a variety of writing styles that appeals to them, often in the same article:
the writing is 'snappy, to the point and fun to read'; 'passionate, serious,
hilarious'. The sense of humour that abounds in SchNEWS, its irrever-
ence, its use of slang, are all commented upon favourably - they con-
tribute to the communication process, even when present in articles
where one might expect humour to be absent (as in the paper's coverage
of marches by fascists in Dover). It is tempting to find similarity here
between the variety of style and language employed and the variety of
methods some respondents identified that SchNEWS promotes, 'a lot of
different ways of working to positively create a better world'. A wide
range of issues (educational, environmental, ideological, economic,
cultural), a wide range of writing styles (telegrammatic, listings of mobili-
zing information, satire, humour, passion, gravity) and a wide range of
tactics (demonstrations, ecotage, letter-writing, fax blockades, setting up
local groups, self-education) - the autonomous, networked multiplicity
of DIY culture is figured in the form, content and (hoped for) outcomes
of SchNEWS's weekly two pages.
Credibility and bias figured high on respondents' evaluations of
SchNEWS. The predictable cry was that the mainstream media was biased
and could not be trusted; SchNEWS on the other hand, was 'trustwor-
thy'. Trust was frequently invoked, not only by activists who felt part of
the culture from which SchNEWS has developed (crudely speaking,
young, middle-class unemployed activists, often living in squatted
premises). Readers far from this milieu praised the paper for its 'honesty':
it has 'nothing to gain by bullshitting', said one. This of course is
arguable: SchNEWS has explicit aims centred on radical social change
that could just as easily be pursued at the expense of veracity or credibil-
ity. 'Bullshitting' can, after all, be simply another word for propaganda.
This appears to be appreciated by some readers who, whilst making the
expected claim of bias in the mainstream media, also find bias in
SchNEWS (this is the nearest any respondent came to negative criticism).
Here, though, the bias does not obstruct reading, it encourages it.
What is perhaps more revealing is the statement, made by several
respondents, that SchNEWS 'can be trusted because it's free (in both
130 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

senses of the word)'. Here again we find it argued that profit-making

within media institutions is essentially corrupting, or at least that it dis-
torts the ethical values writers and editors might wish to uphold. This
harmonizes with the prevalent suspicion of taking advertising within the
alternative media, even where its absence leads to the extreme of 'bare-
foot economics'. To this we might add the value that appears to accrue
from an unpriced publication ('free' in a second sense), as if a publication
that does not ask for our money is somehow less corruptible than one
that does. This argument is rather weak: the extensive networks of free
'community' newspapers that are little more than vehicles for advertising
argues against it. But taken together the two senses of 'free' as applied to
alternative media reveal more: for those who find it valuable, to be able
to read a paper such as SchNEWS without having to pay for it and to be
at the same time signally aware of its independence from other sources of
funding is to participate in an enterprise that is courageous in a capitalist
world, an enterprise that exhibits - and exhorts its readers to join in - an
alternative economy. To participate in such a radical (anti-)economic
world is to construct oneself radically, defiantly. Reading SchNEWS
engenders solidarity: 'readers know that they are not alone', as one
respondent put it. All the readers questioned intimated that they engaged
with the content of the paper (its extrinsic, instrumental value) as well as
appreciating it as an act of defiance, for its intrinsic alternativeness (its
news values, its production values, its economic values). Often this is
regardless of its bias, or even of agreeing with its message: 'I don't always
agree with SchNEWS but at least they are "free".'
Who makes up this community of readers? I have already alluded to
the 'typical' activist reader and these (predictably) appear to constitute a
significant group within the readership. Further, as one respondent put it,
SchNEWS acts as a 'lifeline' to former activists to the extent that it offers
continuously updated information on protests and actions, enabling read-
ers not only to remain informed but to rejoin (or join anew) a protest
when circumstances permit. But this is to homogenize activists and their
activity; there is much differentiation within such a category and conse-
quently many different uses to which SchNEWS is put by its readers. In
addition to its use as an information resource for such as environmental
activists and hunt saboteurs, it is of value to an activist-run music and arts
collective as a source of information for events run by other groups,
information on those groups (and therefore it has a networking value)
and as a site for publicizing the collective and its events. A former
member of the group responsible for Corporate Watch found SchNEWS
valuable as a source of leads for that journal's more detailed pieces as well
as providing formal and organizational inspiration ('I don't just read the
 WRITERS, READERS AND KNOWLEDGE 131

things, I produce them!'). But there are others far from this milieu, far
from DIY culture and transient protest who also feel a sense of solidarity
with the paper. Some readers apologized for not adhering to the stereo-
typical activist-reader ('I'm not an activist or campaigner'; 'I'm a "fluffy"
liberal'). Others went further, citing attitudes or social milieux that might
appear to exclude them as part of the paper's readership: '[I'm] much more
an apathetic cynic type'; '[I] even have friends who hunt'. Once more,
there is defiance here: not against corporate media or global capitalism,
but against their own, local sociocultural settings. Not necessarily to deny
them nor even to rebel against them, but to show that it is possible for
individuals to construct themselves, accommodate themselves - apparently
contradictorily - within a number of settings. We may see here a further
instance of the disruption of purity that we first met in Chapter 3 in the
discussion of Jody's personal web page. Here we see readers of alterna-
tive media who do not all fit easily into a single category (activist or
member of a subculture). Just as we might look for alternative media in
settings beyond the new social movements or zine culture, we should also
consider that their audiences might be drawn from other settings. (What
this study lacks is any evidence to gauge how - if at all - the knowledge
and information gained in the SchNEWS 'community' is employed within
any such individual's local milieu.)
This chapter has shown how the range of contributors and their various
styles have led to a diversity in knowledge production. An emphasis on
independence, autonomy and freedom of expression across these media,
whilst it clearly encourages a range of critical intellectual activity, leaves
some topics unaddressed. There are contradictions between media - even
within a single publication - about the status of intellectual activity. The
profusion of titles and their often divergent (if not conflicting) agendas
can hinder the dissemination of knowledge. In their effort to avoid dogma
and 'the ideological ghetto' they run the risk of embracing a plurality
that can be just as stifling in its welter of competing discourses. McKay
(1998: 44) has urged the movements 'to greater consideration and reflec-
tion' of such crucial issues as the 'coherence of ideology'. How is this to
be achieved when faced with so many perspectives?
Elsewhere I have argued that the success of radical media need not
be based simply on the circulation and readership of specific titles.
Instead we must consider the networked totality of such media; indivi-
dual calculations are less important than the decentralized, participatory
mechanisms that enable a diversity of voices to be heard through a wide
range of media (Atton, 1999b). This argument must be tempered by a
consideration of the reach and impact of these media. If readers are
ignoring the theory and philosophy they present, what is being achieved?
132 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

If such material is only being read by fractions and coteries of the

movements - or by self-selected 'movements within movements' (which
Green Anarchist appears to promote), then a possible outcome is a
further alienation of the bulk of movement actors from those types of
knowledge. I do not assert that the movement media are failing; the
evidence is not sufficient. I have not examined the other critical spaces
where knowledge presented in the media might be disseminated and
reproduced: meetings, demonstrations, protest sites and the 'free univer-
sities' that have arisen spontaneously and temporarily at such sites.
Such further examinations - along with deeper analyses of readers and
reading - will enable a more accurate assessment of the success or failure
of movement media. The evidence presented here demonstrates at least
that there is much intellectual work going on in the radical media. How
effective such work is to the movements themselves remains to be seen.

Note

1. The Northern Ireland Political Collection of the Linen Hall Library in

Belfast is the single most valuable resource for any study of such material. Given
the extent of this collection - over 2,000 political newspaper titles, over 10,000
locally published pamphlets and books, around half of which are unique to the
collection, as well as thousands of posters and other ephemera - and its signifi-
cance not only to alternative media studies but to sociological, cultural and politi-
cal studies - it is surprising that Northern Ireland has not been examined in terms
of media production in these communities - particularly when the quantity and
range of materials held in the Linen Hall suggest it as the locus for the most
intense production of alternative and radical media in the UK throughout the last
quarter of the twentieth century. Joanne Wright's (1991) study of terrorist pro-
paganda draws on Republican News and a handful of other documents and is one
of the few studies to engage in any detail with the media. Her central interest,
however, is in the use of such propaganda, not the social and cultural circum-
stances and significance of its production.
 ©m~n~I1J~®
6
information and
communication technologies
(leTs) in alternative media

he use of the Internet by the Zapatista movement in Mexico to send

T communiques out to the rest of the world has been an especially

potent demonstration of autonomous electronic communication
(Wehling, 1995). Manuel Castells (1997: 79) has called the Zapatistas the
'first informational guerrilla movement'. Worldwide mobilization came in
the form of protests, letter-writing and the sharing of information about
the situation in Chiapas and to this extent - the use of the Internet as the
primary channel for autonomous communication - the movement was
informational and (if only metaphorically) 'guerrilla'. It is as this elec-
tronic complex of informational and communicational possibilities which
is itself linked with other complexes of previously existing technologies
(face-to-face communication, print, music, political demonstrations and
marches) that the Internet holds out such potential for oppositional
groups. Since Chiapas we have seen a range of groups, movements and
causes based in actual struggle, but having at their communicational,
informational and organizational heart the deployment of information
and communication technologies (ICTs), using them to present mobiliz-
ing information, alternative news reports, video and webcam feeds,
Internet radio, archives, discussion lists, chat rooms, bulletin boards and
sound files.
In this chapter I shall extend the discussion of ICTs from zines to new
social movement media. I shall show that the deployment of ICTs appears
developmental and progressive: an additive set of processes that supple-
ment and exponentially increase opportunities for sociality, community,
mobilization, knowledge construction and direct political action. To
134 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

begin I have chosen to examine the use of the Internet by anarchist

groups. I do so not only because this offers a range of interventions, but
also because within a social movement such as anarchism attitudes,
beliefs and ideologies have a pragmatic bearing on the adoption of the
technology under consideration. We are therefore able to see how argu-
ments for and against technology and the range of applications of that
technology link with the wider sociocultural and political features of the
movement. I shall go on to show how the use of leTs by alternative
media groups encourages us to reassess the notions of 'alternativeness'
and 'radicality' under the conditions of new technology.

Anarchist Perspectives on the Internet

Anarchist critiques of the Internet may be divided into two broad cate-
gories (following Burgelman, 1994): 'boom' and 'doom'. These mirror
the categories Burgelman finds in the greater part of the literature on the
information society and its attendant technologies. The first ('boom')
examines the Internet 'from a perspective of discontinuity: a radical and
better society will emerge.' This is most apparent in the variety of maga-
zines devoted to the Internet (such as .net and Wired) that have brol,lght
to a wider public the concepts and the lexicon of technological utopian-
ism. Mike Peters (1996) argues that it is precisely the tone of such writ-
ing that is central to any understanding of its message. Its proponents
espouse a 'cybertheory' that is 'an entirely linguistic phenomenon' in that
what they are describing - a replacement for the lived world of social
relations - has no existence beyond its dependent technology. This tone
will also be found in studies of the new technology, where a euphoric ideal-
ism is typical (Rimmer, 1995 and Rushkoff, 1994 are two very different
examples of this). Even where such optimism is alloyed, the tone remains
generally positive (Hafner and Markoff, 1991; Rheingold, 1994). Some
anarchist groups and commentators see in the structure and 'openness' of
the Internet the prefiguring of an anarchist society. The British anarchist
newspaper Freedom has noted the frequent appearance of the word
'anarchy' in a positive sense, as used by many commentators and Internet
users to describe the modus operandi of the system. Remarkably for an
anarchist organization, an editorial in Freedom even quoted Ian Taylor
(then the UK's technology minister) approvingly: 'because the Internet is
anarchic it's virtually impossible for us as a government to say what can
and cannot be done on it' (Anon., 1995a). Given the legal action taken
 leTs 135

against some anarchist groups using the Internet in Britain shortly before
this editorial was published (see Atton, 1996b for a discussion), Freedom's
view must be considered somewhat naIve. The paper itself was slow to
see the potential of the Internet for its own activities. Anarchist use of
the Internet can be traced back as far as 1988 (with the establishment of
the Anarchy List), yet it did not touch Freedom until seven years later.
Burgelman's 'doom' commentators consider such developments 'from
a perspective of continuity ... in line with the existing (unequal) power
relations'. They view the democratic potential of the Internet pes-
simistically, citing the problems of access to the required technology for
the disenfranchised, the poor and, in some cases, the entire populations
of countries that lack the necessary communications infrastructure. The
dangers of the rise of an information elite exercising absolutist control
over a communications system is one outcome of this scenario
(Haywood" 1995; Panos, 1995). Certain anarchist groups (such as some
'primitivist anarchist' groups and neo-Luddites) have strong ideological
objections to using the technology, which are developed from this argu-
ment. The anti-technology stance of the American anarchist newspaper
Fifth Estate is instru~tive here. Arguing for 'the elimination of the
information age', a member of its editorial collective warns against
espousing a technology that he considers as: 'the last frontier for the
imperial project of late capitalism. If relative autonomy and abundant
piracy flourish today, the legal apparatus of the corporate information
state remains poised to control this exchange in the name of profit'
('Sunfrog', 1995).
Even putting aside such control, he believes that the optimism of
such as Freedom is misplaced, to the extent that the Internet 'further
imposes mechanized intervention in the antiquated realm of activity
known as live[d] experience' and engenders a 'depreciation of sensual
reality and deterioration of communities'. This is not a solitary view. An
anonymous article in the anarchist zine Black Cat (Anon., 1995b) also
emphasizes the alienation that such technology can bring, finding in
the Internet not a force for liberation but another manifestation of
'the spectacle', a debilitating convergence of consumption, control and
pseudo-communication.
Noam Chomsky (1994: 261) who, although he admits his reaction is
emotional rather than analytical ('These are intuitive responses,' he
warns), is especially sceptical: '[e]xtending that form of abstract and
remote relationship, instead of direct personal contact .. . [is] going to
have unpleasant effects on what people are like. It will diminish people,
I think.' Chomsky warns against what Hakim Bey (1991: 110-111) has
approvingly called 'cyberpunk utopianists, futuro-libertarians, Reality
136 A LTERN AT IV E ME D I A

Hackers and their allies', those who, by living out their lives materially
via electronic communication, adopt codes and practices that do not
equip them for unmediated direct human contact. Peters dismisses the
desiderata of the cybertheorists (a 'post-biological humanity', a 'post-
human' world) as possessing merely the 'aura of radicality'. Rather than
actually subverting the 'order of things .. . [they are] exactly identical to
where capital is driving at the moment'. Just as 'Sunfrog' finds, this is no
new threat, simply the old one in a new guise.

Anarchists' Use of the Internet

Even amongst those who advocate using the Internet, there is a diver-
gence of applications. Freedom Press (http://www.ecn.org/freedom/) uses
the Internet as little more than a means of publicity for an established
publishing programme (in the case of Freedom, this includes a fortnightly
newspaper, a quarterly journal and an extensive backlist under the
Freedom Press imprint). It claims to provide indexes to its two serial pub-
lications, the fortnightly Freedom newspaper and the quarterly journal The
Raven. 'Index' is perhaps the wrong word, for what we have under both
are links to the full text of a small number of articles (for The Raven the
aim is to include only one article from each issue). The criteria for inclu-
sion in the 'index' are obscure. Are these texts any more than tasters for
the printed version, and this part of the site little more than advertising?
Others have made available existing print periodicals in their entirety,
though even these differ substantially in their modus operandi. The
American journal Practical Anarchy Online was the first anarchist
periodical to become available solely in electronic format, replacing its
original paper version in 1992. It also offered a form of subscription; its
editor would send subscribers an email alerting them to the appearance
of a new issue on its web site (now a COmlTIOn practice in web serial pub-
lishing). Some journals are located on web sites that must be browsed in
order to discover whether a new issue had already appeared, posted to dis-
cussion lists such as the Anarchy List or emailed directly to subscribers (of
course, a periodical may be 'published' simultaneously by all these meth-
ods). Another US journal, Wind Chill Factor, based in Chicago, declared
in 1993 that 'the cost of printing 5000+ copies per issue [per month] on
newsprint is prohibitive' (10 December 1993, copy in author's possession).
It decided to publish in print quarterly, and to issue 'Info-Bulletins' in
between as necessary, available as a page in a radical Chicagoan magazine
 leTs 137

Lumpen Times, as a freesheet distributed around the city and electronically

for Internet and BBS distribution.
Most anarchist titles continue in paper form. Since their relevance is
largely limited to local or regional audiences, these titles use the inter-
national distribution afforded by the Internet only contingently; it is not
of prime importance. Journals here include The Anarchist (Australia),
The Anarchives (Canada), Counter Information (UK), Love and Rage
Newspaper (US) and Sekhmet (an anarcha-feminist magazine from
New Zealand). It is difficult to judge the effect of such distribution
(anecdotal evidence apart), since no access figures are available for these
titles. (That The Anarchives and Counter Information are posted to the
Anarchy List does however ensure their distribution to at least 500 sub-
scribers worldwide.)
There is no reliable or comprehensive directory of anarchist journals in
either the US or the UK (The Anarchist Year Book only ever offers a frac-
tion of those in circulation), nor are they systematically collected by any
library (the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan is one of the
rare attempts by the academy to preserve an anarchist heritage). Many
titles do benefit from being preserved electronically on the numerous
sites dedicated to archiving anarchist writings and illustrations. Pre-
eminent amongst these is Spunk Library (formerly Spunk Press), which
archives many of the above journals and acts as a distributor for numer-
ous anarchist news services. Its significance and value to the anarchist
community does not stop there. Established in 1992 in Holland, but with
an international editorial group, its avowed aim is 'to act as an indepen-
dent publisher of works converted to, or produced in, electronic format
and to spread them as far as possible on the Internet and in the BBS
society free of charge' (Spunk Library Manifesto, available from Spunk
Library at http://www.au.spunk.org/info/manifest.html). As such it claims
uniqueness. Jack Jansen, the founder of Spunk Press, believes so:

As far as I know, we're the only group working this way, i.e. distributing
globally by using the net as our communications medium. There are other
groups with similar subject matter, but they tend to be one-person projects.
There are also groups who make documents available, like Project
Gutenberg, but they are funded. (Quoted in Campbell, no date)

Spunk Library's catalogue contains essays, speeches and lectures from

prominent anarchists, both historical (Bakunin, Goldman) and contem-
porary (Bookchin, Chomsky). Works by 'dissident' anarchists such as
Hakim Bey, Bob Black and the situationists will also be found here. An
'alternative section' includes works that, whilst not strictly anarchist in
outlook, might be held to inform the debate, such as items on alternative
138 ALTERNATIVE ME D IA

education, environmentalism and nuclear issues. At present the collection

is largely of articles, essays, speeches and letters; in general there are no
full-length books or collected works (except where these are brief). There
are archives of electronic anarchist journals (and partial archives of some
print journals). It contains a comprehensive list of anarchist groups, along
with selected reviews of anarchist books and selections of anarchist
poetry. There are also collections of anarchist images and symbols and
portraits of famous anarchists.
The rationale behind the inclusion of an item in Spunk Library is at once
very loose and very restricted. The editorial collective recognized the need
for a collection development policy (there is such a heading in Spunk
Library's World Wide Web pages) but no policy has apparently ever been
finalized. Anyone is at liberty to suggest items for inclusion. If they are
deemed relevant to Spunk Library (i.e. they are broadly anarchist in out-
look) then they will be accepted. How easily the material becomes part of
Spunk Library is dependent on whether any copyright adheres to the origi-
nal document and the original format of the information - whether elec-
tronic or print. If the latter, then resources and time will be needed to scan
the document, to proofread it and to mark up the text in HTML. All tasks,
from the selection of a document to its final appearance in the archive, are
undertaken by an international collective of volunteers, largely using
borrowed equipment or equipment used primarily for other purposes (i.e.
full-time work). In common with much of the media examined in this
book, it seeks to involve as many people as care to become involved, par-
ticularly those with technical skills to donate. And in common with most
alternative publishing ventures, Spunk Library is run in spare time, at no
profit (the service is free and accepts no advertising). Resources and time
are at a premium. There are currently almost 2,000 items available for
reading and downloading (according to Spunk Library Numerical Catalog
(http://www.spunk.orglcat-us/numeric.html), last updated 13 April 1999).
Although it seeks to make available documents originally published in elec-
tronic form, the majority of its publications are converted from print.

Assessing the Constraints

Many commentators believe that the advent of the Internet marked a dis-
solution of constraints on freedom of expression and on the monopoly of
publishing and distribution. We have already seen how economic and other
constraints can prevent alternative media from reaching even their
 leTs 139

intended audiences. Some would argue that the Internet provides these
media with the means to escape such constraints and to gain unprecedented
opportunities for disseminating ideas and information. James Hamilton
(2000a) notes that the use of the Internet appears to lower the costs of pro-
duction and distribution, if only because there is no physical product to
move around. He does remind us, though, that the Internet remains an elite
medium that is far from universally available. Professionalized skills are still
required to create and distribute material, and the purported global reach
of the medium falls far short in reality. From my earlier discussion of eco-
nomics we can identify two major constraints: (1) Low capital, leading to
low print runs; (2) poor access to mainstream distribution and limited
opportunities for independent distribution. It is in the light of these con-
straints that the potential of any new form of publishing needs to be
assessed. The opportunities apparently afforded by electronic publishing
on the Internet might enable publishers to overcome them. The limits of
small print runs and distribution do not apply to the dissemination of elec-
tronic information; nor does economy of scale. The problem of low print
runs is very real for anarchist publishers and prevents widespread dissemi-
nation of their titles. Though no precise figures are available for the circu-
lation of anarchist journals, Chan (1995) provides the following estimates
of readership: Class War 12,000, Direct Action 500-1,000, Freedom
500-1,000, Green Anarchist 2,000. One would expect the actual copies
printed to be at least half of these figures. Even where a title has a sub-
stantial print run, it often proves difficult to sustain (for example, Wind
Chill Factor's print run of 5,000). Publishing on the Internet requires that
only a single 'copy' of any document exists to provide mass circulation. It
not only dispenses with the notion of circulating copies, it also blurs the
distinction between production and distribution, since the origination of a
document in a format suitable for uploading on the Internet entails the
second. Whilst the Internet does away with the capital requirement for
print runs, it nevertheless requires capital and time to enable the origina-
tion of documents in machine-readable format. Such a requirement is
hardly trivial. For a venture such as Spunk Library, which receives no
income from its work, these resources must come from personal funds or
be offset by the use of equipment intended for other purposes, e.g. scan-
ners and computers used in the course of paid employment.
Just as 'print run' is a meaningless term in electronic publishing, so is
'distribution'. Freedom from the vagaries of a distribution network and
from unsympathetic wholesalers and bookshops is guaranteed, but is only
worth having if the public have access to a publisher's stock in some other
way. In terms of the World Wide Web, we talk of access rather than
distribution, the distribution of multiple copies of a document being
140 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

replaced by the placing of a single copy of a document at a single site.

Detailed figures of access to all Spunk Library publications are not avail-
able, but general figures suggest that the archive is well used. It has been
keeping a hit count since May 1996 and at the time of writing (September
2000) has had over 17,000 hits. The most current figure indicates that in
one month well over 500 documents were accessed from Spunk Library's
Netherlands site (no figures are available for the US site). More than half
the items in the catalogue are downloaded at least once a month. Whilst
these figures tempt favourable comparison with the small-circulation
anarchist papers and journals, it is not possible to compare them directly
with the distribution and sales figures of the anarchist presses represented
in Spunk Library, for a number of reasons. In the main, documents archived
on the site are extracts from publications, not the publications themselves
(with the exception of journal archives, which are a mixture of complete
issues and extracts from the larger journals, such as Anarchy: a Journal of
Desire Armed). For many publishers Spunk Library is a shop window, and
is not intended to replace print publishing. Finally, many documents exist
only in Spunk Library: they were created specifically for it, they only
exist electronically or they are out of print in other formats. In many
ways, then, Spunk Library, like many similar archiving projects, is quite
unlike the passive repository that is the physical archive. Its visibility on
the Web (in spite of its less than popular philosophy, it has been recog-
nized by the Rough Guide to the Internet as being 'organized neatly and
with reassuring authority') enables it to function as a promoter for anar-
chist book publishers, newspapers and journals. It is a supplier of many
of these publications (in part if not in whole) to individuals and groups
seeking out information, education and entertainment. It exists as an
advertisement for a socially responsible anarchism with a significant intel-
lectual pedigree. In a world where anarchism is still largely derided or
maligned by the mass media, that is an important function.
When I first examined the use of the Internet by anarchists (Atton,
1996b), I referred to it 'as simply one more method of communication,
one more weapon in the armoury of the activist, the dissident publisher,
the disenfranchised individual or constituency' (p. 120). There are those
in the anarchist community who still appear to see it like that. For a few
it is a replacement. What is the status of Spunk Library, though? It is
many things: an archive, a distributor, a communication node, a virtual
meeting-place, a publishing house, even a talking-shop. It is certainly
closer to a site like the Mid-Atlantic Infoshop in its multivalent character
and functions than it is to an archive or a publisher, (whilst being both).
Those working for it might be seen as authors, editors, publishers,
disseminators, 'facilitators', organizers - moreover, it offers those roles to
 leTs 141

a multiplicity of individuals and groups, presenting a shifting population

of - what do we call them? - contributors? communicators? activists?
archivists? reporters? readers? Although it remains convenient to talk of
centres, of nodes, the notion of centrality (especially when construed as
a function of authority), of an organizational hub, is eroded in a cyber-
space characterized by interdependent linkage and a lack of hierarchy.
Coupled to a political philosophy such as anarchism, such notions are
made even more fragile. Ownership is similarly problematic. Whilst we
may talk of 'webmasters' and 'site administrators', ownership in terms of
who is responsible for content, for links, for organizing resources is dif-
fuse and uncertain - appropriately enough for systems that operate on
anarchist principles and perhaps liberatingly so. And this apart from any
operation of anti-copyright principles. No faceless cyberspace this. The
complex of relations initiated in cyberspace - intellectual, social, cultural,
political, economic - is overlaid and interpenetrated by a further complex
in the lived world. In practice the distinction between the two is far less
clear than some cybertheorists would have us believe.
Kriha (1994) gives the name 'cyberanarchism' to what he considers the
ideal application of the Internet: to establish 'confederal' structures of
community and communication, free from the 'external coercion' of the
state and commercial providers of Internet access and the limits of com-
puter ownership and literacy. Kriha finds benefit where others find only
detriment: 'by insulating individuals from the need for physical contact,
members of a cybercommunity are insulated from the worst effects of any
potential coercion'. This is to ignore the possibility of other types of coer-
cion, 'patterns of inequality and forms of division' arising within cyber-
space. There is no guarantee that all such forms will disappear under
computer-mediated communication (CMC). We have already seen how
networks are sustained through donations of equipment, itself often
aged, and of intangibles such as free webspace. There is no guarantee that
such gifts will be endless, nor that the potential participants in the net-
works have easy and regular access to the technology. On economic
grounds alone, there is reason to note the 'fragility of the set of circum-
stances that [leads] to ... access' (Mele, 1999: 306).
Kriha's position does offer some purchase in understanding the role and
value of a site such as Spunk Library. In common with numerous sites estab-
lished by new social movements (GreenNet, PeaceNet, McSpotlight,
sq@t!net, contrast.org), Spunk Library exhibits multiple and simultaneous
functions at the same time as it exhibits few of the characteristics of a pub-
lication, or even those of an institution. Its 'membership' ('contributors'?)
is diffuse, in many cases anonymous - whether for reasons of (perceived)
personal security or because personal identity and circumstances are
142 A LTE RN ATI VE ME D IA

deemed irrelevant. It occupies no single physical space; neither an office

nor a library, nor a meeting-place. Such features are of course common to
many net-based 'organizations' - what is striking in the case of Spunk
Library is the extent to which a 'given' technology is fully integrated into
anarchist praxis. The anarchist affinity group model of sociopolitical
organization appears remarkably congruent with the technological model.
The history of the deployment of information and communication
technologies has not always been so congruent. Early efforts to establish
radical television were severely hampered by restrictions on access to
broadcasting frequencies, not to mention the capital-intensive require-
ments of equipment and the necessity for trained operators. The inclu-
siveness and reach of such projects as the American Videofreex were
severely limited (Boyle, 1997). Whilst theatrical screenings in community
centres and educational establishments (a recurring feature of alternative
video production) took the material out of its narrow field of production,
the size of audiences increased only when producers were able to place
their material with public access stations. Given an economy of scale and
a regulatory system that promotes both a Public Broadcasting System
(PBS) and public access cable T~ it is not surprising that attempts to
deliver programmes nationally are most common in the US. Paper Tiger
TV began producing video programmes for public access cable in New York
City in 1981 (Halleck, 1984). Enabled by a grant in 1985, the group
founded Deep Dish TV to provide its own video programmes and those
of other grassroots media producers by satellite. Two of its members,
Martin Lucas and Martha Wallner (1993) give an account of its Gulf Crisis
TV Project series of the early 1990s that was offered to local access and
the PBS by satellite. This account has much to say about co-operation and
networking with local TV stations; it also has much to say about depen-
dence: on public funds for equipment, staffing and running costs and on
the technological and managerial infrastructures necessary for such elec-
tronic media to survive. Political dependence may also be added to the
list of constraints that limit many current radio and television initiatives
on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, low-power FM broadcasting up
to approximately 3.5 miles is regulated by the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC). Ownership is restricted to 'noncommercial govern-
ment or private educational organizations, associations or entities, and
government or non-profit entities providing local public safety or trans-
portation services' (Hamilton, l001b). Hamilton calls this 'institutional-
ized dissent' and sees in it an obstacle to the creation of media operating
on participatory, radically democratic lines whilst it pays lip-service to
freedom of expression. A similar position obtains in the UK where the
temporary licences available to local broadcasters under the government's
 I CT s 143

Restricted Service Licences (RSL) scheme prevent them from promulgating

party-politica~ or other non-aligned political agendas through the legis-
lative limits set on the contents of their broadcasts. RSLs have been used
by local groups, communities and event organizers (of music festivals,
religious gatherings) as well as by universities and colleges, hospitals and
prisons - over 2,000 RSL projects were set up in the 1990s. Under such
legal constraints, community media here are prompted less by local poli-
tics and social change and more by a desire to improve the relevance of
general content to a highly localized audience uninterested in the wider,
regional programmes offered by the BBC and commercial broadcasters.
The managing director of the Isle of Wight's TV12 describes it as 'a gen-
eral entertainment channel' (cited in Scott, 1999: 12). Amongst its talk
shows and DJ slots it offers a schedule already familiar from regional and
national channels: talent shows, gardening and cookery programmes. For
TV12, producing programmes made to industry standards of profession-
alism is essential: 'people don't want to see shaky cameras or home videos'
(p. 13). This is far from the assisted amateurism of the alternative
community newspaper, where the trained reporter took a significant, but
ultimately empowering role in production.
Such initiatives are thus shackled to the prevailing models of local com-
mercial broadcasting, in part due to the need to attract sponsorship and
advertisers, in part due to government restrictions on political content.
Though supportive of these initiatives, Steve Buckley, the director of the
Community Media Association, finds here a 'dual strategy of co-option
and marginalisation' that has led to the de-radicalization of the commu-
nity media sector. He looks for co-operation and networking across the
entire range of alternative media, erasing the polarities of advocacy/
activism and local community/global struggles (in an email to the author).
This is not to characterize all such projects as competing with the main-
stream on the mainstream's terms; alternative artistic cultures have also
taken advantage of RSLs. The London Musicians' Collective ran its
Resonance FM station in the summer of 1998 for the first time, broad-
casting experimental and avant-garde music from London's South Bank
Centre. Kevin Howley (2000), though, still argues for the unregulated
micro-radio movement in the US. In these cheap, low-power stations, a
single person or small groups usually operate out of front rooms or on a
local hillside on behalf of a local community, often a minority commu-
nity. These unlicensed stations offer more than merely transmissions:
their narrowcast capability and transience require close co-operation
with the community in which they operate, for support as well as for the
establishment of a word-of-mouth network to publicize transmission
times (which often need to change to elude the authorities). They also
144 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

provide legal challenges to the FCC, at times successfully arguing their

right to broadcast. Unlike pirate radio these stations do not wish to
remain clandestine; they celebrate their visibility (perhaps 'audibility' is
better?) for the benefit of their community and to seek the removal of
legal restriction on the freedom to broadcast.
We might also consider the value of emerging forms of broadcasting to
community groups and political activists alike, such as Internet radio.
Irational [sic] Radio (http://www.irational.orglradio/) supplies information
on a range of radio initiatives, including information and contacts for set-
ting up analogue pirate radio as well as DIY guides and software links for
webcasting with RealAudio streaming software. Internet radio (usually
'net.radio') encourages a variety of strategies. This need resemble conven-
tional radio only in the notion of broadcasting sound. Using streaming
software, only encoding software is required to convert music or spoken
word into streamed audio files. Jo Tacchi (2000) has called this technol-
ogy 'radiogenic' and asks us to consider its products as 'radio'. Some web-
casters couple it with live FM transmission; some capture other stations'
streamed audio and broadcast that as FM radio. Irational Radio also
recommends using archives of streamed audio to build up one's own pro-
grammes (just as we have seen new print media constructed from existing
print media through strategies of anti-copyright and open distribution).
The Open Radio Archive Network Group (ORANG at http://orang.
orang.de/) offers hundreds of hours of such material for webcasters to
upload and stream as part of their own programming. These initiatives, in
their intertwining and redefining of media forms, in their blurring of crea-
tor, producer and distributor, of broadcaster and listener, suggest
hybridized forms of media production particularly well suited to the
multimedia possibilities of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Whilst
more strategic in nature, even the networking and co-operation under-
taken by Deep Dish TV to upload its programmes to satellite and have
broadcasters use them required a hybridized approach to production and
distribution. Hybridity in media form may also lead to a hybridity of
intention, a hybridity of constituency and even - that Holy Grail of so
many alternative media - a hybrid audience beyond the grassroots ghetto.

Progressive Librarians and McSpotlight

The N30 protests, held to protest against the World Trade Organization
meeting on 30 November 1999 in Seattle (hence N30), prompted a
 I CT s 145

multiplicity of sites that were for the most part unco-ordinated and
decentralized. Here practices of computer-mediated communication high-
light the extreme fluidity and hybridity there can be, whether as continual
flux or temporary repositioning for a specific objective during a speci-
fic period. This might involve groups whose constituency might not be
expected to move in certain directions. During the Seattle protests, a
small group of radical librarians (numbering a little over 100 members)
in the US became variously involved in the protests, engaging and inform-
ing each other and a wider audience through CMC as well as through
direct action in Seattle: this was the Progressive Librarians' Guild (PLG).
PLG embodies an apparent contradiction in its constituency. Its radical
credentials include a strong interest in promoting free speech and
combating censorship in libraries and, inter alia,

encourag[ing] debate about prevailing management strategies adopted

directly from the business world, propos[ing] democratic forms of library
administration, [and] consider[ing] the impact of technological change in the
library workplace and on the provision of library services... (from 'PLG's
Commitment' at http://libr.org/PLG/index.html#statement)

Yet it is part of a profession that is usually represented as being staid, con-

servative and preservationist in its philosophy and actions. Above all,
librarianship has hardly ever been a public site for political activism
(unlike, say, the legal and medical professions). PLG's involvement in the
radical politics of the collective actions taken in Seattle not only presents
a largely unknown and surprising face of librarianship, it also indicates
how members of such a profession can become radicalized in events that
have little obvious connection to the principles and practices of their pro-
fession. During the days following the protest, many documents were
posted to PLG's discussion list (PLGNET-L) containing details of where
to obtain alternative news reports, video and radio feeds and op-ed fea-
tures on the WTO and the protesters; many of these were available
through the AlterNet (www.alternet.org), set up in 1987 by the US-based
Independent Media Institute. AlterNet provides access to articles from
over 200 alternative and independent newspapers and magazines. Here
we see one aspect of radical librarianship in practice: providing alter-
native information and access to the sources of that information. The
educational role that such a practice entails was also evident here in fre-
quent discussion about media literacy and the media representation of
the protesters. PLG members also became protesters: a three-person PLG
contingent marched in Seattle, their 2,000-word report posted to the list
functioning as eyewitness account, media critique and - importantly for
the group - the valorization of librarians as agents of social change.
146 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

('These are the people who make sure Harry Potter stays in the library'
and ~ren't all librarians progressive?' are two of the approving com-
ments they heard during their participation.) Though numerically
insignificant in the protest, these three members of an organization on
the margins of a profession that continues to struggle against a pejorative
public image used CMC to publicize positive reactions to their protest.
Other members built on this, praising a 'narrative [that] vividly place [d]
in perspective the overwhelmingly positive and cooperative nature of the
demonstration' and located their activities at the heart of both PLG's
aims and, they argued, those of the profession at large, emphasizing a
concern 'with our profession's rapid drift into dubious alliances with
business and the information industry, and into complacent acceptance of
service to the political, economic and cultural status quo' (from 'PLG's
Purpose' at http://libr.orglPLG/index.html#statement).
The involvement of PLG in the N30 protests was necessarily temporary
(though the consequences may well be long-lasting). Other organizations
have developed more permanent approaches where the Internet is central
as a hybridizing force in their communication, information and mobilizing
strategies. The McSpotlight web site (http://www.mcspotlight. orgl) shows
how this works at an international level. In 1990 five members of the
anarchist group London Greenpeace were served libel writs by the fast
food company McDonald's for publishing and distributing a leaflet
allegedly containing defamatory statements about McDonald's, claiming
that the company was responsible, inter alia, for the destruction of rain-
forests to provide land for beef cattle, infringing workers' rights, cruelty to
animals and promoting unhealthy eating. Three of the five apologized to
McDonald's; Helen Steel and Dave Morris decided to fight the company
in court. The defendants were unemployed and not eligible for legal aid
and were therefore compelled to conduct their own defence. The 'McLibel'
case, as it was known, became the longest British libel trial and, at its con-
clusion, the longest English trial. The action started in 1990; the judge did
not deliver his final verdict until June 1997 (see McSpotlight's 'The
McLibel Trial Story' at http://www.mcspotlight.orgicase/triaVstory.html).
The McSpotlight web site was set up by supporters and sympathizers of
the two in February 1996.
This represented a huge advance in the information and communica-
tion strategies so far used in the campaign, which had previously relied
on small-circulation radical newspapers and magazines, and on the
distribution of flyers and pamphlets produced by London Greenpeace.
The communication networks that typify the culture of new social move-
ments had already been complicated by the overlapping, various uses
of telephones and fax machines. These were used as both intra- and
 leTs 147

inter-communication devices for movements, as well as weapons for

direct action - the practice of 'blockading' a target organization with tele-
phone calls and faxes. Freed from the constraints that the printed form
places on the construction of networks beyond the local, CMC was able
to significantly extend the opportunities for networking beyond the
ephemerality of telephone call and fax paper.
McSpotlight was initially termed an 'on-line interactive library of
information' by its founders - expanding the idea of the library to
become a space where information is exchanged and created, not merely
stored and consulted. The site contains two major archives: one is the full
trial transcripts, the other an attempt to exhaustively archive print media
references to McDonald's. It also hosts a 'debating room', a discussion
list, DIY protest guides and campaign leaflets ready to print out 'in over
a dozen languages' - even a compressed version of the entire site 'to help
ensure that McDonald's will never be able to stop the dissemination of
this information'. The site is 'constructed' by a network of volunteers
working from 16 countries and continues to call for volunteers: 'HTMLers,
programmers, typists, researchers, artistes [sic], people with skills we
didn't even know we needed till you contacted us' (all references from
http://www.mcspotlight.org/help.html). Compared to Spunk Library its
hit rate is remarkable: at June 2000 it claimed to have 1.5 million hits per
month. In its first year it estimates to have had well over a quarter of a
million visitors (not merely hits, but individuals looking at the site; from
information at http://www.mcspotlight.org/campaigns/current/mcspot-
light/faq.html#1g).
The site's purpose was not exhausted by the end of the trial: it contin-
ued to campaign against McDonald's, as well as becoming a 'protest
node' for a number of campaigns against anti-environmental corpora-
tions. McSpotlight not only connects activists to information, it enables
communication amongst them. The grounding of the site's content in
actual struggle is emphasized by the foregrounding of campaign informa-
tion and leaflets and the assumption that these should be available in
print for distribution at protest sites, on demonstrations, in high streets.
A primary aim of the site was to publicize the McLibel trial in the face of
a largely uninterested national media; yet it also delights in citing those
media in its own publicity (the site claims to have the 'most press cover-
age of any web site' and refers visitors to its extensive press citations and
awards). This ambivalence, coupled with the mass media's own fascina-
tion with the form and use of the site (over and above its content) com-
plicate the site's characterization as 'alternative media', particularly in
terms of its processes and its relation to the mass media. What first
attracted the mass media to the site were its processes, not its content - it
148 ALTERNATIVE M ED I A

was through this publicity that the content of the site achieved a prominence
that political and media lobbying might never have reached.
This raises some significant questions about the status and relation of
alternative media and their audiences under the conditions of CMC.
First, in the case of McSpotlight, we may note the apparent contradic-
tions in the site's approach to publicity. The site seeks to publicize its
causes to as wide an audience as possible (the site may be freely accessed
at point of use; no membership or other fee is required), so it is also
freely available to download. McSpotlight is attempting to bring in as
many visitors as possible to view its contents. That it offers its site-down-
load free of charge might also be seen as encouraging unlimited use, free
of the constraints of on-line net access, line rentals and connection
charges. Ostensibly, though, the download option is intended to frustrate
any attempt by McDonald's to shut the site down. Here the appeal is to
the committed audience, the environmental activist and the supporter of
free speech. This plurality is only contradictory if we expect alternative
media to adhere to some notion of 'purity' - to set limits on their audi-
ence and their reach either by economic or geographic circumstance (that
is, by working with limited materials) or by design and purpose (desiring
to build and retain an elite audience, whether for reasons of security or
ideological purity). The very publicness available to a web site weakens
the grip of such limits. The activities, information and involvement that
McSpotlight promotes are available not simply to 'members' of an essen-
tialized social movement or to an already committed audience - they are
available to all: the sceptical, the uncommitted, the sympathetic, the
antagonistic, as well as to the committed and the activists. And to all of
these all at once.
Second, McSpotlight offers a centre. Its activities may be diverse, its
audience and reach diffuse; in the end, though, it is a focus for a protest
without a geographical or temporal centre. Around it (inspired by it,
even) have arisen numerous sites, for the most part unco-ordinated. There
is a tendency for protest nodes to arise, to gather information, offer
spaces and resources for activists, and then either to disappear as the
protests conclude or to evolve into other campaigns. Activists employing
CMC can adapt their resources, to continually transform and reinvent
themselves with a facility only partially available to print media. Whilst
print media can make use of varied formats, make changes in frequency
and produce 'emergency' issues, the processes of print production entail
slower responses. There are also the conventions of periodicity (an audience
expects regularity of publication in print) and of stability (few titles would
vary a format indefinitely). The use of CMC by new social movements
privileges fluidity, interpenetration and non-linearity. This strengthens
 I CT s 149

the argument against essentializing new social movements as comprising

fixed sets of aims, motives, strategies and tactics that are directed towards
a clear, largely unchanging set of social-change objectives. It significantly
weakens the vanguardist conception of a social movement, where an elite
employs authoritative forms of discourse that are 'at the price of a deep
separation between journalists and readers, producers and consumers.
Acceptance and practice of distinction activates deeper kinds of social
relation in capitalist societies, with perhaps the most disabling ones based
in the notion of consumption' (Hamilton, 2000b: 361). In the previous
chapter we saw how otherwise authoritative forms such as the eyewitness
report and the documentary can be subverted: the vulnerable, self-
conscious reporter at the Labour Party conference, her role further con-
fused by being reporter, interviewee and pundit; the articles in Do or Die
that blend colloquial, first-person address with scholarly writing. These
show media that are combining (at times dissolving) genres and offering
new approaches to representation through radical approaches to content,
form and process, particularly where the stages of the production process
are collapsed into one another and readers become writers. McSpotlight
presents similar opportunities.
Third, where print media offer information directly and the possibility
of communication only indirectly, CMC offers them both directly and
thus confuses the two. Where sites still offer periodical publications as
part of a wider structure of networked information and communication,
periodicity is often eroded, only weakly present in the 'last updated' legend
common to web sites. But there are also less liberating consequences of
such erosion. Linking to other sites on the Net radically reinterprets the
practice of editing a publication. Selection may well be made positively
and thoroughly when choosing to link, but there is little evidence that the
volatility of all web sites is taken into account by linkers. Linked-to sites
might well change their content radically, yet still be considered 'editori-
ally' part of the home site. Changing URLs (Uniform or Unique Resource
Locators), lapsed telecommunications subscriptions and unpaid bills can
all render these rhizomatic enterprises fragile and make them liable to
collapse, disruption and incoherence. Further, the facility with which
links may be made encourages 'saturated linking' - what is benignly
termed 'surfing' can often be perpetual consignment to a maze of increas-
ingly irrelevant data. Unmoderated discussion lists also present compli-
cations: the reliability of information in posts; the security of data;
managing the information flow; dealing with inappropriate responses
('flaming' and 'spamming'); simply finding the time to make sense of it
all. Boundaries dissolve, edges disappear - the very notion of 'publica-
tion' is challenged.
I SO A LT ERN AT I V E M ED I A

What are the distinctive features of alternative media under the

conditions of CMC? Does it make any sense to talk of alternative media
in cyberspace? Where the processes of production are available to any-
one, where the horizontal, networked flows of information and commu-
nication are inbuilt, where anyone can become their own publisher, their
own polemicist, does a specific set of media termed 'alternative' have any
identity? Some distinctive processes of alternative print media production
are no longer radical on the Web. Non-hierarchical methods of commu-
nication and ease of participation in creating and commenting on media
texts are now normalized in Internet practice. The experimental nature
of much alternative print publishing is called into question: either it is no
longer a meaningful practice (the small print run) or it has become
absorbed into a dominant practice of web publishing that ordinarily
entails transformed roles and social relations that were once the province
of alternative media production (anyone can be a writer or a publisher).
Experiments with blending informational and communicational forms
are a further instance of common web practice. The exclusiveness of
alternative media as a communication process is also eroded. The
narrowcast nature of much alternative media entailed small audiences (it
guaranteed it) and restricted access to those who knew where to go for
such media. Some media producers preferred this, either for reasons of
elitism or for security. By contrast, publicity for many web sites is likely.
For those with a message to the world this may be attractive; for such as
Spunk Library it may be ambivalent. As one of the most visible adver-
tisements for anarchism it has been the target of virulent (and perhaps
even libellous) criticism (Atton, 1995). For others with more clandestine
activities to protect, publicity can threaten the entire enterprise.
Whether desirable or not, the Internet entails publicness, though there
persists the possibility that no one will find your information, so lost is it
in the welter of electronic data. Perhaps the only significant constant in
print and CMC versions of alternative media is content, particularly the
origins of that content. For much alternative media, content comes from
lived, local experience. Miller and Slater (2000) have argued that there is
no such place as 'cyberspace'. The significance of Internet use proceeds
not from a solipsistic and technocratic desideratum of value only to
Hakim Bey's 'cyberpunk utopianists' but from 'locally contextualised
[practices of] consumption and production' (Tacchi, 2000: 293). In order
to sustain a notion of alternative or radical communication in cyberspace
we must, as Kevin Robins (1995) has urged, let the real world break in
on the virtual one. It is through the use of CMC by new social move-
ments for collective political action that we best see such an irruption in
action.
 leTs 151

Hybridity and 'Purity'

Throughout this book, from the theoretical arguments over dimensionality

to the examination of the varied approaches to alternative media organi-
zation and production and their aims and knowledge structures, we have
seen difference at work. The dimensions explored in Chapter 1 do not
merely serve to explain production and distribution strategies (such as
innovations in form and reprographic techniques, and new sites for dis-
tribution), they also account for the realignment of social and profes-
sional relations that alternative publishing offers (such as methods of
collective organization, writing and editing, the deprofessionalization of
editing and writing). Whether within each media form or across forms;
in the hybridized voices constructed from a range of contributions - from
the movement-intellectual, the activist, the native reporter, the everyday
narrative, the 'guerrilla semiotics' of the collage; collective writing and
editing and anonymized multiple contributions - all work to dehomoge-
nize alternative media as a single field of production, as a consolidated
part of a single alternative public sphere. There is hybridity in audiences,
too: the notion of the reader-writer transforms the Fiskean active audi-
ence from an individual engaged in a type of everyday social action to a
creator and communicator of symbolic materials out of that everyday, at
once a media producer, a witness and a media critic. Audiences are dif-
fuse and divergent. The deployment of ICTs by a site such as McSpotlight
presents a plurality of resources to an equally plural range of audiences.
The publicness it can employ forces us to let go of any notions of purity
in alternative media. Though Internet technology prompts us to do this
forcefully at present, the problematics of purity, hybridity and difference
have a longer history in alternative media.
In her study of two films made in the early 1970s by local community
groups in the East End of London, Gillian Rose (1994: 49) recognizes
that the marginalized cultures that are represented and which produced
the films were 'neither the same as hegemonic cultures nor entirely dif-
ferent from them'. She identifies many dimensions of difference, amongst
them the final purposes of the film: as a campaigning tool, as a con-
sciousness-raising event, as a spur to public discussion, as a weapon
against the bureaucrats, as a process of building self-confidence within a
community - even as a method of renegotiating the identity of that com-
munity. The site of production of the films - just as much as the screen-
ing of the films - forms a space for discussion and negotiation. Rose
discovers in these cultural interplays a version of Homi Bhabha's (1990)
'third space' where meaning and understanding emerge from a negotiation
152 A LTE RN AT IV E ME 0 I A

of cultural and political identity as the site of a hybridic excess of meaning.

Whilst the deprofessionalization, decapitalization and deinstitutionaliza-
tion proposed by James Hamilton are extremely useful concepts in devel-
oping a theoretical framework for alternative media, they should not
force us into unwittingly perpetuating an untenable duality between alter-
native and mainstream. John Downing (2001) has drawn attention to the
shortcomings of his earlier work (Downing, 1984) where he proposed a
rigid binary model of alternative and mainstream media. As he has
acknowledged, this offered little opportunity for considering the democ-
ratization of mainstream media, the application of skills and techniques
from the mainstream, or the hybridic or subversive use (detournement) of
mainstream media products and processes - to which many instances from
this book attest.
Homi Bhabha (1994: 39) has talked of eluding 'the politics of polarity'
and of 'the transformational value of change [that] lies in the rearticulation,
or translation, of elements that are neither the One ... nor the Other ...
but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of
both' (1994: 28; emphasis in original). To read such a possibility into
alternative media has methodological implications for 'alternative media
studies'. We need to consider not only form and content, but the processes
and relations that inform them and are in turn informed by them. The
study of alternative media needs to interrogate identities and practices
that are negotiated across the terrain of a third space that hybridizes
practices between hegemonized and marginalized cultures.
 conclusion

he present study has repeatedly emphasized that the alternative

T media - as a major constituent in the dissemination of the views and

opinion formation of 'subaltern counterpublics' (Fraser, 1992) -
have the potential to offer even more than 'interpretation'; they provide
readers with access to other readers' (activists') lived experiences and on
occasion offers these as part of a network of sociocultural and sociopo-
litical projects (often aimed at social change through extra-parliamentary
means). The alternative media can provide empowering narratives of resis-
tance for those counter-publics that are written by those very counter-
publics. If such counter-publics 'want nothing more than the writing of
their own texts' (as Njabulo Ndeb,ele expressed the desire of the repressed
of South Africa; cited in Carusi, 1991: 103) then the contemporary alter-
native media appear able to realize that desire. A key feature of these
media is the erosion of the expert who is dependent on formal education
and professionalization, to be replaced by the autodidact, informally
skilled often through collective experimentation. In Bourdieusian terms
this autodidact has 'a relation to legitimate culture that is at once "liber-
ated" and disabused, familiar and disenchanted' (Bourdieu, 1984: 84).
The 'heretical mode of acquisition' (ibid.: 328) of cultural capital by the
counter-cultural intellectual 'leads to a refusal to be classified, with the
injunction to resist fixed codes' (Featherstone, 1991: 44).
We see here the erasure or weakening of the influence of educational
accomplishments and social background that Bourdieu argues are neces-
sary for entry into legitimate culture. These autodidacts are not entering
legitimate culture at all; neither does their lack of cultural capital con-
demn them to the middle- or lowbrow- theirs is an oppositional culture.
Frith (1996) has argued that low culture as much as high culture 'gener-
ates' cultural capital and its attendant cultural authority amongst its
consumers (see also Fiske, 1992b; Thornton, 1995). Alternative media
appear quite indifferent to formal education. They are as interested in
education gained through action as in that gained through the written
154 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

word. I have shown how within new social movements the production of
the printed word is often an encumbrance that can get in the way of the
'real job': activism. But education can also come from involvement in the
production and organization of the media. Education in the alternative
media leads to self-reflexive practice. If the notion of mobilizing infor-
mation, of information for action, is to be seen as 'action on action' (as
Melucci has it), as the development of a reflexive practice that aims to
change the 'lifeworld' of its participants, then self-reflexivity within a
'free space' such as an alternative media project may be seen as 'self-
action on self-action' (Cox, undated), where all individuals are able to
realize their own potential and develop the self-awareness that can arise
from understanding one's position within the free space and one's own
potential to create and contribute from that position. Experimentation
and creativity with alternative possibilities of 'being' and 'doing' will
form the heart of such activity; autonomy and the absence of unbalanced
power relations can develop 'a reflexive habitus' (Cox, 1997) that can
connect the self with the lifeworld: '[t]his grassroots intellectual activity
of rethinking and reorganising everyday life links ... "transformation of
self and transformation of social structures'" (ibid., incorporating a quote
from Hilary Wainwright).
Such possibilities are strongly suggestive of the strategies promoted by
Paulo Freire's (1972) critical pedagogy. Freire was concerned with achiev-
ing the educational empowerment of the oppressed, the disenfranchised
and the marginalized through encouraging dialogue as a form of study, as
horizontal communication that privileged empathy, hope, trust and criti-
cism. This dialogue would be grounded in the everyday language and
reality of the students and aimed to critique (and ultimately to change)
the oppressive social forces that surrounded them without reproducing
those oppressive structures in their own social practices. One of the many
applications of Freire's approach is that of Ira Shor (1980) who worked
with Open Admissions students at the City University of New York in the
1970s to engender an egalitarian form of education that was 'mobilizing,
the pedagogical means to advance political consciousness' (1980: 95).
The characteristics of many of the alternative media practices I have
examined in this book - horizontal and dialogic forms of communication,
an emphasis on self-reflexivity, the employment of everyday language,
critical approaches to the media and its objects, mobilizing power and the
significance of prefigurative politics - all suggest educational and trans-
formational possibilities that might constitute an autonomous project of
critical pedagogy.
The ability to express and publish opinions in the alternative media is
radically different from the situation in the mass media. Whereas access
 CONCLUSION 155

to the mass media by readers is severely limited, in the main being

through letters to the editor (the majority remaining unpublished, thus
further limiting access), the alternative media claim a democratic, par-
ticipatory ethos, where readers are very often able to contribute articles
and take part in editorial decision-making, even becoming editors them-
selves. Such an ethos promotes what Ben Agger (1990: 36) has termed
'intellectual democracy' which, he argues, is essential to halt the decline
in discourse that he identifies as a key element in the withering of the
dominant public sphere. The alternative media, in offering their pages
to activists and readers, enable the members of an alternative public
sphere to function as Habermas argues they must if they are to be
a public body: 'to confer in an unrestricted fashion - that is, with
the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom
to express and publish their opinions' (Habermas, cited in Eley,
1992: 289).
Access to the alternative media encourages self-publishing, whereby
readers may publish their own papers and magazines quite independently
from one another (most often as zines), with minimal financial outlay.
There is less restraint on form, too. The alternative media in their public
sphere not only involve people directly in their production and distribu-
tion, but they do so with far less commodification than do the mass
media, which have become, in John Durham Peters's words, 'a means for
imagining community... just splendid for representation but horrid for
participation' (Peters, 1993: 566). Alternative media actively elicit such
participation by their very construction, offering it in the place of spec-
tacle; identity instead of mere representation (p. 559). As social practices
democratize involvement in media production, such roles are further
eroded. The desires and demands of agents are articulated through alter-
native media by a set of transgressive practices that challenge dominant
forms of organization and cultural and political practice, and that estab-
lish their own alternative frames of participation, power and creative
action. Participants do not simply consume reflexively, but produce
reflexively in an attempt to 'change the way in which we construct our
selves, our actions and our lifeworlds' (Cox, 1997); 'as more people learn
to communicate about communication, they revolutionize the traditional
order' (Eder, 1993: 22). Raymond Williams has highlighted both the
value of communication in social networks and its role in reflexive learn-
ing processes:

What we call society is not only a network of political and economic arrange-
ments, but also a process of learning and communication. Communication
begins in the struggle to learn and describe. (Williams, 1976: 11)
156 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

I have argued that the alternative public sphere is an appropriate

conceptual foundation from which to understand the production and
reception of autonomously developed accounts of experience, critiques,
information and knowledge. Here are Nancy Fraser's 'subaltern counter-
publics' engaging in 'parallel discursive arenas' in order 'to invent and cir-
culate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of
their identities, interests, and needs' (Fraser, 1992: 123).
Within this sphere we might consider alternative media as instances of
the 'free spaces' identified by Melucci (1995), who stresses the necessary
independence of such spaces from government, the state and other domi-
nant political institutions and practices - particularities they hold in com-
mon with a public sphere model - an independence that allows for their
maintenance as experimental zones within which alternative means of
'sociation' may be developed. Cox (undated) similarly defines free spaces
as 'situations of a relative weakening of determination by the logics of
power and economics' and Bookchin considers the affinity group as the
'free space' par excellence, 'in which revolutionaries can make them-
selves, individually, and also as social beings' (Bookchin, 1986: 243).
Such theorizations bear upon the characteristics and values we have
found in the practices of alternative media; they centre on autonomy,
solidarity and the development of reflexivity in the creative processes of
democratic media production.
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 index

access, 25, 154-5 Bamboo Girl, 61-2, 65

hierarchy of, in mainstream media, Benjamin, w., 23-4
10-11, 111 Bhabha, H., 151-2
ACE see Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh Big DumpTruck!, The, 72-5
active participation see participation Big Issue, The, 32-3, 45-6
activist intellectuals, 106-7, 120-1 circulation, 39-40
activist newsletter see SchNEWS economic strategy, 50-1
advertising 'black and green economy', 50, 51
parodies, 44 'bottom-up production of difference',
revenue, 37 63-4
advocacy media, 16 Bourdieu, ~, 29, 30, 153
alternative bookshops, 47 breaking out of alternative ghetto,
alternative culture, 35 37,39
alternative distributors, 46-7 breaking silences, 115-16
alternative media Britain
criteria and definitions, 9-19 anarchist movement, 106
vs mainstream media, 11, 13, 21, football fanzines, 57
152, 154-5 new social movements, 80-8
alternative public sphere, 34-5, 37, punk fanzines, 57
155, 156 Shoreham, animal rights protest, 122
distributive use in, 42-9 underground press, 34, 35-6, 40, 56
'alternatives in principle', 19-20 broadcasting licences, 142-3
Alternatives in Print, 13-14 Burt, S., 59, 60
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 116-17 Bypass, 40
anarchism, 50, 81
anarchist groups/networks, 47-9 cable and satellite broadcasting,
see also under Internet 142-3
animal rights protest, Shoreham, 122 Cahn, A., 81
anonymity/pseudonymity, 107-8, 120 CastelIs, M., 68, 75
anti-copyright, 42-4 censored stories, 10, 11
anti-nuclear media, West German, 34-5 Chesshyre, R., 112
archives, 69-71 Chomsky, N., 17, 135-6
Spunk Press/Library, 15, 137-8, 140-2 circulation, 39-41, 139
see also Progressive Librarians' class struggle, 44, 122, 125-6
Guild (PLG) Class War, 118-20, 126
attitude vs position, 23-4 Class War Federation, 118-20, 126
Aufheben, 125-6, 128 CMC see computer-mediated
Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh (ACE), communication (CMC)
48-9 coherence and coverage, 126-8
168 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

collective organization(s), 51-2 decentralization, 51, 98

decision-making in, 98-102 decision-making in collective
as impediment to success, 33, 34, 35, organizations, 98-102
37,99 deinstitutionalization, 25, 73, 152
see also editorial collectives; democratic communication, 8, 9, 38
organization democratic structuring principles, 101
colonialism, 113 deprofessionalization, 25, 73, 152
Comedia, 33, 34, 35, 37, 99 detournement, 43
negative definition of alternative Diba, Diva?, 71-2
media, 14 Dickinson, R., 100, 101
Cometbus, 62-3, 64 differences of opinion, 122, 123, 127,
Cometbus, Aaron, 62-3, 64 128, 131
communication(s) direct action, violent, 85, 95, 119-20
chain, 24, 25-7 distribution
democratic, 8, 9, 38 alternative fora, 45-9
horizonalilateral, 51-2, 99, 104 alternative public sphere, 27, 28, 42-9
models, 103--4 Internet vs print media, 139--40
nevworks, 82-3, 87-8, 101 open, 44-5
see also computer-mediated zines,59
communication (CMC); Internet DIY culture, 86, 120, 127
subcultural, 22, 57 DIY politics, 82
value of, 155 DIY publishing, 18-19
and zines, 67-8 Do or Die, 83--4
community media coherence and coverage, 126-7
deradicalization of, 143 contributors, 105, 106-8, 121, 128
'native reporting', 113, 115-16, 117 'Dear Nora' column, 86
news values, 16-17 knowledge production, 121--4
Community Media Association, 143 open distribution, 44-5
computer-mediated communication (CMC) organization and production, 88-91
distinctive features, 150 participation and control, 100, 101, 102
uses, 145, 146-9 Downing, J., 18-19
see also Internet anti-nuclear media study, 34-5
consumerism, 18, 73 on collective organization, 99
content, 27 on communication, 99, 104
process over, 22-3 on economics of production, 37, 41
copyright, 42--4 'moments of transformation', 51, 88
Counter Information, 44, 126 radical media theory, 19-23, 87-8
and ACE, 48 'self-managed media', 50
counter-experts, 106 Duncombe, S.
counter-hegemony, 7, 18-19, 21, 28 on collective organization, 51
'native reporting', 115 on culture of consumption, 18
coverage and coherence, 126-8 on readers as writers, 23-4
creative expression, 13-14 on zines, 58, 61, 63, 67
cultural distance, reduction of, 77, 78
cultural production, 29-30 Earth First!, 44, 83
culture jamming, 44 see also Do or Die
Curran, J. and Seaton, J., 22, 37, 40 economics of production, alternative, 35-7
'cyberanarchism', 141 differences, 33-5
cyberspace communities, strategies for limits and freedoms, 49-52
building, 69 zines,59
ecotage,86
Dahlgren, :Po, 24, 25 editorial collectives, 107, 108,
Darnton, R., 25-7 109-10, 112
decapitalization, 25, 73, 152 education, 153-4
 IN D EX 169

electronic media Germany, anti-nuclear media, 34-5

open distribution, 45 'ghetto' of alternative media, 33-5
see also computer-mediated gift economies, 60
communications (CMC); Internet Glasgow University Media Group,
elitism of mainstream media, 10-11, 111
10-11, 111 graphics
environmentalism, 41, 50, 81, 83 detournement, 43
see also Do or Die; Green Anarchist reprographic technologies, 27, 28, 38-9
Etext Archives, The, 69-70 grassroots engineers, 106
everyday life, 63-4, 72-5, 77-8 grassroots media, 16-17
Eyerman, R. and Jamison, A. Green Anarchist, 84-5
on knowledge production/producers, anti-copyright, 42-3
105, 106, 107, 108-9, 125 articles, 49, 86
on role of movement intellectual, 121 coherence and coverage, 127
e-zines content, 124-5
archives, 69-71 contributors, 106, 109-11, 128
ASCII, 69 distribution, 46, 98
cases, 71-5 layout and 'production, 124
and sociality, 75-8 organization, 95-8
vs print media, 75 participation and control, 101, 102
and zine culture, 68-9
hand-written copy, 38
fan culture, 29, 54, 65-6 Hebdige, D., 24, 57
fanzines Here and Now, 126
definition, 54 heterogeneous voices see multiplicity
football, 15, 57 of voices
history, 55-8 'hierarchy of access', 10-11, 111
MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, 65 hybridity, 'purity' and, 151-2
Pilgrims, 64-5 hyperlinking, 76
punk, 24, 38,57
Farseth, E., 66 identity
feminism, 41, 127 in cyberspace, 76
films, 151 hidden, 107-8, 120
see also video productions resistance, 68
finance, 35-7 role of movement intellectuals, 121
Fiske, J. in zine culture, 67-8
on alternative vs mainstream news, 'information for action', 12, 85-6, 87-8,
11,13 121, 125
'bottom-up production of difference', information and communication
63-4 technologies (ICTs) see
on culture of everyday life, 77-8 computer-mediated communication
'oppositional readings', 25 (CMC); e-zines; Internet
'shadow cultural economy', 29 infoshops, 47-8
football fanzines, 15, 57 intellectuals, 105-7, 120-1
form, 27 Internet, 76-7
formalizing and informalizing anarchist perspectives, 134-6
impulses, 100, 101 anarchists' use of, 136-8
Frankfurt School, 7-8 archives, 69-71
Fraser, N., 153, 156 constraints of, 138-44
'free space', 154, 156 radio, 144
Freedom, 134-5, 136 vs print media, 68, 75-6, 136-7,
freedom and limits, of alternative 139-40, 149
economics, 49-52 see also computer-mediated
Funaro, Amy, 71 communication (CMC)
170 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

investigative reporting, 11-12, 115-16 music business

Irational Radio, 144 musicians and fans, 65-6
record shops, 58-9
Jakubowicz, K., 19, 102 subsidies, 35-6
Jansen, J., 137 see also fanzines
Jenkins, H., 54
journalistic field, 30 'native reporting', 112-17
Juhasz, A., 51, 114 networks, 82-3, 87-8, 101
news
knowledge production investigative reporting, 11-12, 115-16
examples, 121-6 'native reporting', 112-17
and knowledge producers, 105-12 selection, 10, 11
values, 16-17
Labowitz, J., 70 video productions, 86
LaFerriere, Jody, 72-5, 77-8 Nigg, H. and Wade, G., 17
language, 118-20 non-commercial motivation, 13, 34
liberal pluralism, 8 non/unestablished intellectuals, 106, 107
limits and freedom, of alternative Northern Ireland, 116-17
economics, 49-52 Not the View, 15
Liverpool Free Press, 17
local community see community media offset litho, 38
London Greenpeace, 146-7 open distribution, 44-5
oppositional vs alternative culture, 19
McDonald's, 146, 147, 148 organization, 88-98
McKay, G., 49, 95, 131 electronic publishing, 140-2
'McLibel' trial, 146, 147 planning differences, 33-5
McQuaid, D., 8 see also collective organization(s);
McRobbie, A., 57-8 editorial collectives
McSpotlight, 146, 147-8 O'Sullivan, T., 15-16
mail, 60 ownership, 28
mail art, 29-30 electronic publishing, 141
mainstream media
critical studies, 10-11 parodies of advertising, 44
'hierarchy of access', 10-11, 111 participation, 103-4, 128-32, 155
oppositional readings of, 24-5 and control, 98-102
propaganda model, 37 principle, 69
reporting on Seattle, 14 Pawson, M. and Skeet,]., 40-1
vs alternative media, 11, 13, 21, 152, personal zines (perzines), 60-1
154-5 photocopiers, 38
mainstream popular culture, 75 Pilgrims, 64-5
marginalized groups, 11, 151 PLG see Progressive Librarians'
'market penetration', 50 Guild (PLG)
Marxism, 7, 125-6 politics
MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, 65 D~82
Melucci, A., 82-3, 154, 156 of polarity, 152
Miller, D., 116 position vs attitude, 23-4
Minority Press Group, 34 presentation, 69
mobilizing information (MI), 85-6, 125 print media, 41
movement intellectuals, 105-6, 107, vs Internet, 68, 75-6, 136-7,
120, 121 139-40, 149
multiplicity of production, 41 process over content, 22-3
multiplicity of voices, 9, 40, 111 production, 88-98
differences of opinion, 122, 123, 127, characteristics of alternative media,
128, 131 15-16
 INDEX 171

production, cont. SchNEWS, 85-6, 87

see also economics of production, contributors, 105, 109, 111-12, 120-1
alternative distribution, 45, 46
Progressive Librarians' Guild (PLG), formats, 45
145-6 organization and production, 93-5
propaganda model of mass media, 37 participation and control, 99-100,
protest groups see social movement 101, 102
organizations (SMOs); social race issues, 127
movements, new readers, 128-31
pseudonymity/anonymity, 107-8, 120 science fiction magazines, 55-6
public educators, 106 Seattle
public-colloquial style of discourse, 119 mainstream media coverage, 14
punk fanzines, 24, 38, 57 and proliferation of computer-mediated
punk movement, 57 communication, 144-5
purity 'self', in zine production, 58, 68
of expression, 55 self-action, 154
and hybridity, 151-2 self-exploited labour, 35-6
self-organization, 82
race issues, 127 self-validation, 61-3, 67-8
radical ideas, 14 Shoreham, animal rights protest, 122
radical media theory, Downing's, Silverstone, R., 76
19-23,87-8 Smith, M.]., 69
radical populism and language, 118-20 SMOs see social movement organizations
'radical'vs alternative media, (SMOs)
9-10, 18-19 social change, promotion of, 14, 15, 18
radio broadcasting, 143-4 social movement organizations (SMOs),
Radway, ]., 63, 67 120, 121, 123, 127
RAP see Rochdale Alternative Paper social movements, new, 80-8
Rau, M., 55, 56, 104 social relationships
readers, 128-32 in cyberspace, 59-60, 76-7
as writers, 103-4 and zines, 58-61
Reclaim the Streets (RTS), 122-3 social responsibility, 13-14
record shops, 58-9 socialism, 41
reprographic technologies, 27, 28, 38-9 socialist media, 20
Republican News, 116-17 Socialist Worker, 103-4
resistance solitary agents, 28
channels of, 82, 83 Spunk Press/Library, 15, 137-8, 140-2
identity, 68 Spurr, D., 113, 115
Restricted Service Licences (RSL), 142-3 Squall, 33, 86-7
rivalries see differences of opinion anti-copyright, 43
road protests, 123 circulation, 39
Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP), 104 contributors, 105-6, 107, 121
Rose, G., 151-2 distribution, 44
Royal. Commission on the Press, on format and production methods, 38-9
alternative media funding, 36-7
circulation, 39 organization and production, 91-3
definition, 12-13 participation and control, 100-2
distribution, 46 race issues, 127
RSL see Restricted Service Licences (RSL) squatters, 47, 87
RTS see Reclaim the Streets (RTS) Starache, 71
story-telling, 62-3
Sandata, Sabrina, 61-2, 65 street-selling, 46
satellite and cable broadcasting, 142-3 structurelessness, 99, 101
Savage, ]., 38 subcultural communication, 22, 57
172 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

subculture, 57-8 Van Der Graaf Generator, 64

subsidies, 35-6 video productions, 51,113-14, 142-3
magazines, 81
Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), 49 news, 86
themed issues, 110-11 violent direct action, 85, 95, 119-20
theoretical background, 7-9
theoretical models, 24-9 Whitaker, B., 17
Downing, 19-23 Williams, Ro, 9, 19, 25, 155
Tomsett, Fred, 64-5 working-class press, 35-6, 103-4, 115
Traber, Mo, 16-17~ 113 World Wide Web see Internet
transformation writers
moments of, 51, 88 knowledge producers, 105-12
promotion of social change, 14, 15, 18 readers as, 103-4
self and social structures, 154
social relations, 27 zine culture, 22-3, 24, 54-5, 58-61
transience, 49 and e-zines, 68-9
Triggs, To, 57 zine editors, 18, 59, 60-1, 66
typewritten copy, 38 types, 100
zines
underground press and communication, 67-8
Britain, 34, 35-6, 40, 56 in cyberspace, 75-8
US, 56, 81,118 distribution, 59
underproduction, 114 economics, 59
unestablished intellectuals, 106, 107 examples, 61-6
United States (US) and sociality, 58-61
anarchist journals, 136-7 US, 23-4,58
underground press, 56,81, 118 Zobel, Co, 58, 68
video programmes, 142
zines, 23-4, 58
see also Seattle