ABSTRACT
The protagonists and practitioners of the alternative press regarded it as the most vibrant, influential, and heartening development in South Africa's media in the 1980s. Its detractors, most notably the government, took a different view. The label "alternative" itself presents several problems. One was that several editors to whom it applied found it inaccurate or misleading. The assumption so far is that the great diversity and multiplicity of publications labeled "alternative" could realistically be placed in a single category. Doing so could easily lead to an oversimplification and a discounting of important differences among the alternative papers. The typical alternative paper faced an array of difficulties that separated it from the mainstream press. These are divided into funding and advertising and other limitations. Because alternative papers were driven by motives other than profitability and generated only part of the money needed to establish and run a paper, each relied on outside funding.
