Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The Relevance Of Alternative News Sources To The New Age

By Jeanette Riggs


Alternative news sources may seem contradictory to mainstream media but there is always one thing certain, these will always be critical to the new society. Alternative media are sources of information that could be publicly supported or commercially managed. These could be in forms of movies, magazines and the Internet. These could differ from the mainstream media or MSM in terms of mode of distribution, mode of production and content. While MSM are distributed through wide distribution channels, prior news sources are aimed at maximizing existing sources and at representing marginalized groups.

Proponents of alternative media believe that mainstream media are quite biased in presenting and framing information although alternative media can be biased too. Proponents claim that their being bias is largely different from the mainstream given the different framework and set of values they use in delivering or disseminating information. Alternative news sources, therefore, have different viewpoint which may never be found in the mainstream.

As the name suggests, this form of information distribution has independent media outlets with different categories under the context. These can be community media, student media, social movement media and subcultural media but are not quite limited only to those. Each category emphasizes critical aspects for which audiences can be served best in accordance with its aims and interests.

Advocates can rather have self-images by means of self-marginalized information haven. This model gets them to create identities based on the traditional accepted codes of news distribution. This successfully challenges the mainstream media in a ton of ways through different outside sources.

According to an advocate, it is designed not simply to sell audience to advertisers in order to boost revenue or to maximize profit. This exists in order to have effective means of organizing media as much as further social activities. With the growing trends of digital technologies, however, issues that have to do with the dichotomy of this model and the mainstream are starting to arise although digital technologies are not purely intended as information media.

Digital technologies have broken ground for modern citizen generated journalism where news anchors are considered trivial in delivering reports. With the camera and video application on cell phones, anyone can now update the public with the recent happenings through uploading pictures as or videos on the blogosphere as well as social networking sites.

For this reason, the public no longer has to wait for a news telecast in the evening to fresh and current global happenings. People could be immediately informed whether they are browsing their computers or just their cell phones.

Tactical media, also denote media activism, are good examples of this type of reporting. These became popular in Europe as well as the United States in 1996 and from then, have been used by an array of activist groups including Irrational, Institute for Applied Autonomy and Bureau of Inverse Technology.

Alternative news sources have earned a growing interest among audiences due to their wide availability. While broadcast media are still the primary source of information, issues on media bias just never seem to be on the wane. What matters, however, is that people are able to get important pieces of information from these.




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