Organizing media: A political economy typology of alternative media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this participatory communicative action research (PCAR) project undertaken by the Media Action Research Group (MARG), we use an intersectional political economy framework to better understand how alternative media activists organize and structure their projects. The findings are based on interviews conducted between 2015 and 2019 with 80 media activists in 38 alternative media projects in eleven countries. Based on a granular analysis of the structures and practices of horizontality in grass-roots media projects, we are attentive to five key dimensions of alternative media organizing: structures, funding, labour, imaginaries and intersectional power. This analysis was generative of a typology that categorizes alternative media projects into six ideal types: critical entrepreneurial journalism startups, hybrid vertical–horizontal media projects, hybrid commercial-activist media projects, media workers’ cooperatives, DIY volunteer-run media collectives and DIY autonomous media networks. We find that a strong alignment of media practices and alternative media imaginaries within an alternative media project may be a predictor of its long-term resilience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".