The study “The Contexts and Consequences of Hybridity for Alternative News Audiences” by Jennifer Rauch from Linfield University is a commentary on alternative news audiences, which has been a neglected field of study. It comments on the special issue and the seven studies presented there.
According to the author, the study of alternative news audiences is currently flourishing. The special issue on Digital Journalism, that the commentary is part of, contains seven studies on the topic.
The studies by Rauch particularly focuses on alternative news users as members of a hybrid audience. There were several interesting findings about this group. For example, many alternative news users purport not to use mainstream media, but they in fact use it more than mainstream audiences do.
In addition, the group labeled many outlets “alternative” that were in fact quite mainstream by other definitions, like Fox News, Huffpost, Facebook, and The Daily Show.
The other studies were also mentioned. The study by Andersen, Shehata and Andersson (2023) found out that alternative and mainstream media consumption are cohabitative, it did so by a survey.
In the study by Steppat, Castro and Ester (2023), audiences in five European countries and the United States were surveyed. The result was that: “people in more fragmented and more polarized media systems were more likely to report using mainstream outlets than alternative ones.”.
According to Reiter and Matthes (2023), when alternative news use goes up, so does political interest, overall – but there were also people who become disinterested in politics after heavy alternative news use.
Schwarzenegger (2023) provides insights on alternative media users and how they curate their news repertoires. Most common were the omnivorous “critical curators”, who had rich, diverse news repertoire and were critical of mainstream media.
“The awakened infowarriors” were even more critical of mainstream media, using few legacy sources and a lot of alternative news. The less common were “completists”, who also had a rich selection like critical curators by were less critical of the mainstream, “reconnaissance” users used mostly mainstream with a bit of alternative in the mix, and “community seekers” found refuge in the alternative news community and were similar to the infowarriors.
Atkinson, McWan, White, and Hoque (2023) looked at elite members of the audience, U.S. political operatives. Both republicans and democrats linked to alternative news in their social media, with the purpose to generate anger towards political opponents. Similarly, von Nordheim, Rieger, and Kleinen-von Königslöw (2023) showed how populist leaders in eight countries used alternative news to position themselves against mainstream elites.
The author notes that Roslyng and Blaagaard’s (2023) discourse analysis study seemed an outlier. It was about the coverage of comments on Youtube showing a young boy’s treatment at a refugee center in Denmark. According to the results, mainstream media mainly invited politicians and elite sources to comment on the video, while alternative news used a counter-hegemonic approach focusing on a “for the people, by the people” approach. Born-digital media combined the approaches, using nonpartisan reporting while allowing readers to participate.
The commentary article “The Contexts and Consequences of Hybridity for Alternative News Audiences” was in Digital Journalism.
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