Chris Atton is Professor of Media and Culture in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University, UK. His books include Alternative Media, An Alternative Internet and Alternative Journalism. He has made special studies of fanzines, the media of new social movements and audiences for avant-garde and other 'difficult' forms of popular music.

This Companion provides an authoritative and comprehensive examination of the diverse forms, practices and philosophies of alternative and community media across the world.

The 50 chapters present a range of theoretical and methodological positions, and arguments to demonstrate the dynamic, challenging and innovative thinking around the subject; locating media theory and practice within the broader concerns of democracy, citizenship, social exclusion, race, class and gender.

By considering media practices across a range of cultures and communities, this collection is an ideal companion to the key issues and debates within alternative and community media.

Introduction: problems and positions in alternative and community media PART I: Concepts 1. Alternative logics? Parsing the literature on alternative media 2. Vanguard media: the promise of strategic communication? 3. Alternative media and voice 4. Beyond the binaries? Alternative media and objective journalism 5. Commercialism and the deconstruction of alternative and mainstream media 6. What's left? Towards an historicized critique of alternative media and community media 7. Alternative mediation, power and civic agency in Africa 8. Conceptualizing social movement media: a fresh metaphor? PART II: Culture And Society 9. Changing citizenship, practising (alternative) politics 10. Cameras and stories to disarm wars: performative communication in alternative media 11. Theorising voice in India: the Jan Sunwai and the Right to Information movement 12. Blackfella listening to blackfella: theorising Indigenous community broadcasting 13. Civic participation and the vocabularies for democratic journalism 14. The political economy of capitalist and alternative social media PART III: Policies And Economies 15. Community media policy 16. Community media in the Nordic countries: between public service and private media 17. Alternative and community media in Canada: structure, policy and prospects 18. Community media and media policy reform in Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa 19. Alter-globalisation and alternative media: the role of transnational alternative policy groups 20. Internet freedoms and restrictions: the policy environment for online alternative media 21. The economic tensions faced by community radio broadcasters 22. Dynamic practices and their potential for the alternative public sphere in South Korea 23. Peripheral visions? Alternative film in a stateless nation 24. Between aspiration and reality: a study of contemporary third sector media production PART IV: Doing Alternative Journalism 25. Politics, participation and the people: alternative journalism around the world 26. Digital media and news 27. Listening to the voiceless: the practice and ethics of alternative journalism 28. Haiti Grassroots Watch: daring to be more than alternative 29. Giving peace journalism a chance 30. Beyond the first story: developing the citizen journalist identity 31. 'iPhone-wielding amateurs': the rise of citizen photojournalism32. Independent citizen journalism and terrorism: from blogs to Twitter 33. Working the story: news curation in social media as a second wave of citizen journalism 34. Community and alternative media: prospects for 21st century environmental issues PART V: Communities And Identities 35. Making media participatory: digital storytelling 36. Diasporic media in multicultural societies 37. Prisoners' radio: connecting communities through alternative discourse 38. Fanzines: enthusiastic production through popular culture 39. Movement media as technologies of self-mediation 40. Occupy and social movement communication 41. Will it harm the sheep? Developments and disputes in central Australian indigenous media PART VI: Cultures of Technology 42. Technological struggles in community media 43. A clash of cultures: pirate radio convergence and reception in Africa 44. I film therefore I am: process and participation, networks and knowledge - examples from Scottish community media projects 45. FLOSS TV: TV hacking within media arts practice 46. Social media and activist communication 47. The motivations of alternative media producers: digital dissent in action 48. Hacktivism as a radical media practice 49. 'LOOK @ THIS FUKKEN DOGE': Internet memes and remix cultures 50. Slow media as alternative media: cultural resistance through print and analogue revivals