Alternative Journalism, Alternative Voices

Tony Harcup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415521895
• eBook ISBN: 9781135130183
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Bringing together new and classic work by Tony Harcup, this book considers the development of alternative journalism from the 1970s up until today.

Bringing theory and practice together, Harcup builds an understanding of alternative media through the use of detailed case studies and surveys. Including opinions of journalists who have worked in both mainstream and alternative media, he considers the motivations, practices and roles of alternative journalism as well as delving into ethical considerations.

Moving from the history of alternative journalism, Harcup considers the recent spread of 'citizen journalism' and the use of social media, and asks what the role of alternative journalism is today.

PART I
Alternative media, alternative
voices

It was when I got a university job after spending 20-odd years working as a journalist that an old school teacher got in touch and said he hoped to see a new version of Poor Men's Guardians, the exciting history of the radical and working class press written by Stanley Harrison, a journalist on the Daily Worker/Morning Star. My former teacher felt that personal involvement in alternative media from the 1970s onwards meant I should be the one to continue telling the story that Harrison had told as far as 1973. This book is definitely not a new version of Poor Men's Guardians, but the following chapters do, in their own way, tell (some of) the rest of the story of alternative media from 1973 to now.

When Harrison left off he was apparently encouraged by the fact that, in the early 1970s, ‘from diverse backgrounds, a hundred small Davids emerged to challenge — or simply to mock — the press Goliath’. Surveying this dissident scene, he continued:

Periodicals styling themselves ‘underground’ — Private Eye and the Black Dwarf, Oz and Time Out — accompanied by a big expansion of student union journals at universities and numerous small neighbourhood, tenants' and squatters' papers — appeared for shorter or longer lives. Working the vein of ‘instant journalism’ that is almost as old as print itself, they created new rebel followings.

(Harrison, 1974: 240)

I am not sure that Private Eye ever quite styled itself as part of the ‘underground’, despite its iconoclastic attitudes and frequently revelatory journalism, but Time Out was indeed part of that scene in its early years, something that is hard to imagine for anyone who knows it only as the commercial behemoth it went on to become. Harrison is right about the expansion of all sorts of ‘rebel’ publications in that period and about the fact that some of them disappeared almost as soon as they arrived, but then the impact of alternative forms of media has never really been measured by how long a particular title sticks around. It is worth noting his use of the term ‘instant journalism’ to describe something that was happening long before live-blogging or tweeting could even be dreamed of, reinforcing the point that printing was ‘new technology’ once.

One of the print publications undergoing its gestation just as Harrison was writing those words was to be a new alternative newspaper for Leeds, a city with some alternative antecedents where media are concerned. It was the birthplace of one of the most widely read oppositional newspapers ever produced, the Northern Star, described as both ‘the champion of the poor’ and the ‘principal organ’ of the movement for grassroots democracy in the 1830s and 1840s (Harrison, 1974: 105–107). It was also the place that, in 1832, had seen 200 workers march through the streets carrying a copy of the mainstream Leeds Mercury on a pole before burning it outside the newspaper's office in protest at the paper's support for an 11-hour working day for children in textile mills, as opposed to the workers' demand for a 10-hour limit (Walker, 2006: 378). A century and a half later and the demands may have changed but the issues remained, and the newest newspaper in the city that was going to cover them was to be called Leeds Other Paper, on which I would end up working for more than a decade and about which there are several chapters in this collection. But I was not around for its birth in January 1974 because I was 200 miles away at school in London.

At that time I was involved in alternative media, however, albeit of the less journalistic and more ‘community publishing’ variety. It may not have been journalism as we know it, but it was certainly media production that allowed alternative voices to make themselves heard; it was also an education, teaching us that it was possible for ‘ordinary people’ to do things for ourselves. As the Desperate Bicycles put it in one of the more inspirational punk singles of 1977, ‘The Medium Was Tedium’: ‘It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it!’ The sleeve of their self-released record, which the band hawked around to independent shops in person (Mills, 2011: 113), explained that the total cost of producing their debut single was just £153, concluding, ‘Now it's your turn … ’ If things were not always quite as cheap and easy as their chorus implied, things were still possible and that is a message that continues to resonate throughout alternative media of whatever form, wherever and whenever created.

Alternative voices expressing themselves through various forms of ‘community communication’ in the early to mid-1970s are the subject of Chapter 2, which was first published in a special edition of Race & Class journal devoted to the life and works of the teacher, writer and activist Chris Searle. It is the only chapter in this collection not to deal with the journalism of alternative media but many of its themes are of direct relevance to alternative journalism, concerned as they are with issues of critical literacy, active citizenship and working-class self-organisation; besides, most alternative publications of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were happy to feature poems and song lyrics amidst their more ‘journalistic’ material, so why shouldn't we? Before that, in an original contribution written especially for this book, Chapter 1 contextualises what follows by introducing the concepts of alternative media and alternative journalism, discusses their place in the field of journalism studies, and indicates some of the key themes that will be addressed in subsequent chapters.

The former school teacher who suggested continuing the work of Poor Men's Guardians was in fact the above-mentioned Chris Searle, to whom this collection is dedicated.

References

Harrison, S. (1974) Poor Men's Guardians: A Survey of the Struggles for a Democratic Newspaper Press 1763–1973. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Mills, R. (2011) Everything Happens in Cable Street. Nottingham: Five Leaves.

Walker, A. (2006) ‘The development of the provincial press in England c. 1780–1914’, Journalism Studies 7(3): 373–386.

1
INTRODUCTION

From ‘native reporting’ to ‘native researching’

In the Rare Books Room of the University of Sheffield's main library, history is unfolding before my eyes in the form of bound original copies of the Sheffield Register newspaper dating from around the time of the French Revolution. That was a time when Sheffield was known as one of the most radical towns in England, prompting the king to describe it as a ‘damned bad place’ (Price, 2008: xi). It was the sort of time when ‘every cutler in Sheffield’ had a copy of Tom Paine's combustible book, The Rights Of Man, a court heard (Harrison, 1974: 30). The Sheffield Register, published by Joseph Gales from 1787 to 1794, printed extracts of work by Paine himself as well as other radicals, but it also carried more of its own reporting than did many earlier such publications, setting ‘new standards in provincial journalism, abandoning the paste-and-scissors copying of the London press, and presenting original editorial articles’ (Thompson, 1968: 166). The issue dated 2 July 1790, for example, listed the precise number of electors who were then allowed to vote for each member of the House of Commons: like a scene from an old episode of the television comedy Blackadder, the size of the electorate ranged from 40 voters down to just one, giving a whole new meaning to the slogan, ‘One man, one vote’.

This denial of any real democracy in Britain was a core issue for alternative publications of the time, as was a concern for human rights not just at home but also overseas. The 22 January 1790 issue of the Sheffield Register reported on a meeting held to campaign for the abolition of the trade in African slaves, giving the lie to that old canard about how ‘everybody’ at the time accepted the slave trade as merely part of business as usual. ‘Foreign intelligence’ was included in the four-page weekly newspaper, alongside local news, reports from London, shipping news from Hull and Liverpool, letters, essays, poems, market prices and adverts for cures for toothache and the like. Each edition also carried a list of shops that stocked the paper, something that many alternative publications still did two centuries later.

Outside the Rare Books Room it is the twenty-first century again and, just across the Pennine hills, today's equivalents of Joseph Gales and Tom Paine are busy tweeting links to stories they have just posted on the website of Manchester Mule, which describes itself as a ‘non-profit independent media project, looking to promote social justice by getting out the news and views you won't find elsewhere, from the rainy city and beyond’ (Manchester Mule, 2012). There is no list of newsagents that sell it within its pages because it has no pages, there is no physical product for shops to stock, and in any event its content is given away free. It exists only online where, in addition to the website and the use of Twitter, it also has an active presence on Facebook. Yet, although the technology is very different, the content and ethos of Mule would not be wholly unrecognisable to the ghosts of Joseph Gales or his contemporaries if they were ever to drop by for a look, and nor would much of the alternative and radical media that came after Gales' time such as the Poor Man's Guardian, Commonweal, the Workers' Dreadnought, Lansbury's Labour Weekly, Peace News, Liverpool Free Press, the Leveller, Red Pepper or SchNews. OK, so any visiting spirits of eighteenth-century radicals might have been taken aback by some of the druggy material within Oz, the ‘black power’ message of the Black Panther newspaper, the feminism of Spare Rib, or the sexual politics of Gay News, but then again we can never be sure.

As well as following Manchester Mule on Twitter, anyone with access to a computer or a smart phone has also been able to keep up to date (sometimes up to the minute, even the second) with events far beyond the north of England by, for example, following, retweeting and engaging with some of the many ‘ordinary’ people who found their voices during the series of protests in the Middle East and North Africa that became known as the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, during which ‘new social media, including YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, mobile telephony distributing SMS (short message service) messages, images and live video streams, and internet bloggers have all played a key role in the recent uprisings though in differing permutations across the different countries concerned’ (Cottle, 2011: 651). Rather like the French Revolution, the impact of the Arab Spring will be debated for a long time to come, as will the influence of the ‘Occupy’ movement that spread from New York's Wall Street to many cities around the world in 2011–2012 and that spawned its own alternative media such as The Occupied Wall Street Journal (occupiedmedia.us) and The Occupied Times of London (theoccupiedtimes.co.uk) to speak up on behalf of ‘the 99%’ who reject the greed of the wealthiest 1%.

From Tahrir Square in Egypt to Wall Street in the USA, and beyond, the speed with which popular protest has sprung up and spread, aided by online social networking and social media, has been explained in part as a reaction to what BBC journalist Paul Mason describes as ‘the collapse of the economic model’, which prompted a ‘loss of fear’ in the Arab Spring and a ‘loss of apathy’ among many in the west (Mason et al., 2012). Recent events may not be on the same scale but, as with the French Revolution — and the English Revolution or civil war that preceded it by almost 150 years — times of flux tend to lead to bursts of new alternative media as well as to more widespread questioning of old certainties and ‘common sense’. New possibilities seem to open up and, as Karl Marx put it, everything that once seemed so solid and permanent can melt away surprisingly rapidly.

When Marx used the phrase ‘all that is solid melts into air’, he was discussing the way in which conditions of industrial production within capitalist societies were constantly changing in the search for new markets, but he could just as easily have been writing about the state of the journalism industry today. The ‘constant revolutionizing of production’ that Marx and Engels (1967 [1848]: 83) described in the mid-nineteenth century has become the daily experience of anyone working within mainstream journalism since the dawn of the twenty-first century as media companies have sought ways either to maximise profits or minimise losses in a world of free content and social media. This state of flux means that today is the most exciting time ever to be a journalist, the worst time ever to be a journalist, or a bit of both, depending on who you are listening to; but all seem to agree that lots of the old certainties have gone.

Certainties such as who is a journalist and how you become one. Back in my day, the traditional way of becoming a journalist in the UK was to go straight to a local weekly newspaper after leaving school, sign-up for a period of formal apprenticeship known as ‘indentures’, move on to a regional evening or morning newspaper and then either stay there and possibly m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• PART I Alternative media, alternative voices
• PART II The alternative local press: a critical overview
• PART III Reporting from the ground up: alternative journalism in practice
• PART IV Alternative media activists: motivations and reflections
• PART V Alternative media today and tomorrow
• Appendix 1: statements published in The Other Paper, LOP and Northern Star
• Appendix 2: ‘views on the news’
• Appendix 3: national conference of alternative papers
• Index