Journal of Alternative & Community Media - Current Issue

In today’s society, alternative media are emerging as an essential source of information and news. However, these platforms have limited control, as any user can be a news source, so the news ecosystem is noticeably changing, and informational phenomena and processes are emerging that alter the audiences. This article presents research aimed at identifying the causes of the formation of the so-called disloyal audience and the specifics of their use of alternative media content. The article is based on a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with Lithuanian media users who identify themselves as users of alternative media and do not trust the mass media, which they refer to as official media. Research results indicate that mistrust of the mass media is only one of the reasons audiences choose alternative media. Informants defined the most outstanding value and satisfaction of alternative media usage for them as receiving engaging, close content presented in a style they liked.

Community radio stations depend on the labour of volunteers to fulfil their crucial social, cultural and democratic functions. Yet volunteering is treated as purely mechanistic in much community radio literature and practice: a means to an end, a resourcing challenge or reflective of the participatory environment. Volunteers invest countless hours in supporting community radio stations; time that could be spent in paid employment, informal labour or pursuing leisure activities. So, what is it that drives community radio volunteers, and how does this fit in with broader understandings of volunteer motivations? Drawing on interviews with Australian community radio volunteers, this article proposes four categories for understanding volunteering motivations in community radio: leisure, instrumental, relational and ideological. Interrogating the nature of volunteering in community radio offers practical insights for stations seeking to attract and retain volunteers while also providing theoretical insights into how community engagement and civic participation develop through community media.

Recently, the issue of community media sustainability has attracted an increasing amount of attention among media scholars worldwide. The ways in which media sustainability is being discussed in this context have changed markedly, widening the debate to encompass aspects such as participation, diversity, organizational structures, respect for the environment, technological innovation and community service. However, in the United Kingdom the evolution of the community media sector around ambiguous concepts such as ‘access’ and ‘social gain’ has shaped the sector into a neutral, non-specific area, devoid of a clearly recognizable stance in relation to commercial and public media. In turn, sustainability has centred around funding and competition for scarce resources. This article joins recent contributions in UK literature by authors such as Coleman and Padfield in calling for a clear understanding of community media as an alternative to state and market broadcasters and link community engagement and social capital to sustainability as a whole. This article takes as its point of departure an extensive literature review on the topic of community media sustainability, examining the latter as inextricably linked to its social role and proposing a multi-layered approach to the concept that incorporates areas such as technological and environmental sustainability to more traditional takes on the subject. A case-study methodology is used to engage with the experience of Welsh community radio station GTFM over a number of years. Currently covering significant areas of the Rhondda, Cynon and Taf valleys in Wales (RCT), with a potential audience of approximately 165,000 people, the case of GTFM illustrates the ways in which sustainable strategies based on cooperation, such as shared local newsrooms, a clear focus on local volunteers, collaborative approaches to fundraising or pooling technological resources, might play an integral part in the strategies used by community media to achieve sustainability.

This article develops contextually adapted ethnographic methodologies for studying community radio and local governance relationships in rural African contexts. The research advances three methodological innovations: household-based media ethnography revealing collective consumption practices invisible to individualistic research paradigms; institutional ethnography mapping informal political networks operating through cultural logics and collaborative translation methodologies maintaining epistemological integrity across Indigenous and academic knowledge systems. Drawing from four months of fieldwork in northern Ghana, this study demonstrates how conventional survey methods systematically obscure relationships between media practices and democratic participation. The research employed multi-method ethnographic design combining household observation, in-depth interviews, broadcast monitoring and Radio Listener Club ethnography. These methodological adaptations generate transferable analytical frameworks applicable to community media research across postcolonial contexts characterized by linguistic diversity, traditional governance structures and hybrid institutional formations. Findings reveal that contextually sensitive ethnographic methods uncover critical dimensions including local language broadcasting’s role in political identity formation and complex participation negotiations in mediated public spheres. This methodological framework provides a blueprint for culturally responsive research on community media and governance relationships in marginalized communities.