"Alternative Media," a broad category with many internal subdivisions,
can be understood to refer to almost all media producers and products
except those from the very largest corporate media. This range may
include mainstream alternatives as well as more marginal and radical
ones. This is how an edit shows on a wiki.
In capitalist economies the media, like its counterparts
in other sectors or industries, is designed to produce profits for
public or private shareholders or owners, often through advertising
revenues in addition to the sale or rental of media products themselves
(films, magazines, television and radio programing, newspapers, books,
musical recordings, websites, and so on).
What makes a certain
media product or producer "alternative" is often a question of
perspective, and may depend on the content of the media product and/or
on its means of production. Many so-called "alternative media" may
share the goals and structures of corporate giants, differing only by
being smaller in scale or targeted to a less-massified audience of
buyers or consumers.
Some examples may help illustrate this
concept. In the United States, for example (other national contexts may
be easily substituted here), large, established, traditional television
networks like the National Broadcasting System (NBC), the American
Broadcasting System (ABC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)
constitute the major corporate broadcast media, while newer entities
like the Cable News Network (CNN), Fox Broadcasting and dozens of other
corporate entities are considered "alternative" only in the sense that
they reach smaller audiences, often with more clearly subjective
political, cultural or other ideological tendencies.
Similarly,
in the U.S. print media, the phrase "alternative weeklies" is used to
refer to scores of newspapers which target younger readers and whose
circulation is nearly always inferior to major daily newspapers, and
"alternative" magazines may target niche markets as defined by
lifestyle, special cultural, political, regional interests, and the
like.
In the music industry, larger "alternative labels" produce
and distribute musical products that may represent countercultural
tastes that major labels have rejected, and "alternative" films may
include documentaries and smaller-budget feature productions that do
not reach the widest-possible market.
For the majority of these
examples, however, the definition of "alternativeness" is often a
question of scale or degree, rather than a difference in kind, from the
major corporate media. While the content or audience may be
counterposed to the productions of corporate mass media, the means of
production may be virtually identical. There are even circumstances in
which certain media sectors, while remaining culturally marginalized,
may be highly financially profitable, like pornography, for example.
In
many national contexts, legal distinctions may obtain between
for-profit corporate media and not-for-profit media enterprises, and
while many of these latter may still be corporate in structure, they
are often driven more by artistic, cultural, political, religious or
other ideological motives than with financial profitability. Many
university presses, for example, publish books for academic audiences
while being subvented financially. Non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), associations of various kinds, and public or state-sponsored
broadcast networks or stations may produce films or broadcasts, or
publish magazines or books or new media, with funding from private
foundations or organs of the state. Organizations of these varieties
often produce media products which cannot compete profitably in the
massified-media marketplace, and consequently are of little direct
financial interest to major corporate media. While only occasionally
profitable, however, many of these organizations produce media products
which remain grounded in mainstream cultural, social and political
values and perspectives.
Toward the further end of this wide
spectrum, however, there exist many much smaller, marginal independent
producers whose means of production and media products share little in
common with the mainstream. These "alternative media" range from "art"
films to small literary magazines, from marginal book publishing
companies to community radio stations, from "underground 'zines" to
politically extremist "samizdat" and new-media websites. They often
represent political, cultural, religious or other ideological
perspectives at the very extremes from the dominant culture, and which
in many national, legal contexts are subject to state censorship or
informal cultural suppression. Some of these more radical "alternative"
media are explicitly anti-capitalist ideologically, and attempt to find
means of production that correspond to these beliefs. “Autonomous”
media, guided by a mix of anarchism and libertarian and anti-statist
strains of communism, seek not only to reject the profit motive in
media production, but commercial exchange entirely.