New Article Out: Between Journalistic and Movement Logic - Disentangling Referencing Practices of Right-Wing Alternative News Media

At first glance, alternative online news media seem to be fundamentally different from traditional mass media - in tone, in their journalistic quality and in their political agenda. In their latest article, "Between Journalistic and Movement Logic: Disentangling Referencing Practices of Right-Wing Alternative Online News Media", Eva Mayerhöffer (AlterPublics, Roskilde University) and Annett Heft (Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society) investigate the extent to which alternative right-wing online news media use in-text source references and hyperlinks to follow a journalistic of establishing facticity and provide background information vs. a movement logic of dismissing opponents and supporting partisan allies.

The study shows how right-wing alternative online news media on the one hand try to distance themselves from established media and their logics, but in practice use them in large numbers as welcome legitimising sources. The interplay of both logics of dealing with sources points to the hybrid nature of alternative news media situated at the boundary between journalism and political activism. The study, published in Digital Journalism, can be found here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21670811.2021.1974915