ABSTRACT
In recent years the phrase ‘citizen journalism’ has entered the language of those journalists, scholars and indeed citizens who have proclaimed ‘that the interactive and participative nature of the web means that everyone or anyone can be a journalist with the right tools’ (Fenton, 2010: 10). It has been defined as the action of citizens who, although neither trained nor employed as journalists, play ‘an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating information’ (Bowman and Willis, cited in Long and Wall, 2009: 263). Yet citizen journalism is a contested concept; ‘the object of a discursive struggle’, according to Carpentier et al. (2009: 172). While some see in citizen journalism the hope of what Deuze (2009: 255) conceptualises as a ‘participatory media culture, civic emancipation, and an emerging new humanism’, other journalists, scholars and citizens see it as little more than ‘opening the floodgates to unverified, de-professionalized gossip … The arguments are multifaceted and contradictory … and often in uncharted territory’, as Natalie Fenton (2010: 10-11) puts it. But it is only uncharted territory if we see such ideas about non-professionalised media as synonymous with the internet and digital technology. Arguably, at least, scholarship that explores earlier forms of alternative media – particularly alternative forms of reporting that gave ‘voice to the voiceless’ (Atton and Hamilton, 2008: 45) – can help illuminate contemporary debates about the future of journalism. This chapter will examine how a major event was covered contemporaneously by
alternative media; in the process, this case study will point to practices that could be seen as benchmarks against which to measure the performance of alternative and so-called ‘citizen journalism’ today. The 1984-1985 miners’ strike in the UK is widely seen as one of the key struggles between labour and capital within late twentiethcentury UK history, in which much mainstream media mobilised behind the latter. Coverage of the strike lends itself to such a study not merely because it was a key historic event but also because it lasted long enough to allow for practitioners even in
poorly resourced forms of media to build contacts, develop reporting practices and to sustain them over a significant period of time. One study of audience beliefs about the miners’ strike concluded that it was ‘very
difficult to criticise a dominant media account if there is little access to alternative sources of information’ (Philo, 1995 [1991]: 41). That dominant account was, according to the Daily Mirror’s former industrial editor Geoffrey Goodman (2009), hostile to the strike, with much of the UK’s mainstream media willingly ‘marshalled by Downing Street to provide the propaganda that helped defeat the miners’. As we shall see below, alternative media provided alternative sources of information and alternative perspectives. This went beyond commentary and opinion to embrace forms of reporting that, arguably, could justifiably be labelled as ‘citizen journalism’; that is, it was journalism produced by citizens who were not formally trained as journalists and who operated outside the commercial and mainstream media industries and structures.
