Journal of Alternative & Community Media - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2016

While journalism scholars have identified a lack of critical reflexivity in journalism, few have identified ways to educate university students for critically reflexive journalism practice. This article reports on a university teaching project that enables such practice as a means to counter exclusions, stereotyping and misrepresentation of Aboriginal people by large-scale Australian media. Using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to track transformations in student dispositions, particularly as they relate to practice, the article shows how participating students became more competent and confident Aboriginal affairs journalists with a strengthened sense of themselves, their practice and the journalistic field. Their investment in the field was strengthened as they sought to tell hidden and disregarded stories, and to include previously excluded voices, perspectives and representations. The article describes and analyses an example of critically reflexive learning, practice and teaching that has the potential to transform students’ learning, the journalistic field and relations between Aboriginal non-Aboriginal Australians.

This study examines the activist-oriented participatory media processes of those who arguably could be classified as contemporary lumpenproletariat in San Francisco, California. Based on ethnographic research conducted at POOR Magazine in San Francisco, this article argues that, despite obstacles of disenfranchisement and disindividuation, people living in poverty and homelessness can organise collectively for social change via participatory media processes. Working with POOR Magazine, I conducted a qualitative analysis of the process of participatory media production and the media artefacts of people living in poverty and homelessness. The data are analysed through a critical/cultural theoretical lens to help reframe and redefine the conception of the lumpenproletariat. The findings of this study saw the possibility for collective organisation emerge in four ways: ideology, leadership, organisation and collective identity; this gives us a better understanding of the power and potential of lumpenproletariat media.

Hyperlocal media are characterised by their narrow focus on small geographic regions, and citizen or community participation in the news-production process. However, very little work has focused on the dynamics of community development in relation to these websites – including the role of participation. Based on a case study of award-winning New Jersey-based hyperlocal news website Baristanet, this article draws on an online survey of readers about how and why they participate on the website. The analysis finds low levels of active contributions in the form of comments following news stories and evidence of a limited representative community on the website. Specifically, analysis of the survey responses suggests that contested user notions of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) have significant impacts on participatory behaviour. The article argues that a virtual community, based on an offline geographic region, can face particular barriers when it comes to fostering website participation, which may suggest a reinterpretation of Anderson’s imagined community in the age of participatory journalism.