The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by Eva Mayerhöffer and Jakob Bæk Kristensen, who start from the same interest in alternative media and digital counterpublics, understanding the latter especially as the digital environments that are established by the sharing of alternative media content and exploring their inward or outward orientation.

Alternative news environments, then, are constituted by those actors who have shared the same alternative URLs either directly or by on-sharing other actors’ shares. The project worked with a sample of some 160 left-wing, right-wing, and ideologically different alternative news media across Germany, Austria, Sweden, and …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk, focussing on the relations between professional alternative media as an indication of boundaries in the journalistic field. This connects with a long history of research into field theory and boundary work in journalism.

The present study thus understands journalism as a strategic action field – but even if boundaries are now blurry, they still exist: the actors in governance units (press, industry associations, union, funders) and incumbents (editorial-driven, legacy news media) intersect with each other and together form the field of journalism and produce a collective frame of …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is by Svenja Boberg and colleagues, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the growing attacks against mainstream media (as ‘lying media’ or ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central to this are also alternative news media sites that present their own views as a corrective to the mainstream. In Germany, these are deeply rooted in right-wing and populist communities, and are supportive of counter-hegemonic attitudes, including to COVID-19 containment measures. But the alternative media spectrum is complex: there is a continuum of outlets from mainstream-style outlets (via people who also …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session was my own, with Felix Münch, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. Here are the slides: