Scientific Paper

“The life span of alternative media in a hybrid configuration” Fadma Aït Mous & Driss Ksikes Scientific Paper The life span of alternative media in a hybrid configuration. The cases of Lakome and Mamfakinch in Morocco Fadma Aït Mous Université Hassan II, Associate Researcher (EGE) Driss Ksikes Director of Cesem, HEM research centree 1 “The life span of alternative media in a hybrid configuration” Fadma Aït Mous & Driss Ksikes Introduction When the SAHWA Survey was launched in 2015, major transformations had already occurred in “alternative media” in Morocco. This didn’t prevent young people from developing alternative uses of social media and different political strategies than the dominant ones. But a melancholic attitude emerges from our research, showing that the youth were very sceptical about the media’s capacity to mirror their aspirations, and when connected (10.5%), they were more likely to surf on foreign websites.1 But if youth defiance towards political representations and mainstream media is obvious, the weak capacity of the alternative media to survive, while supposed to partly fulfil these youth expectations in terms of freedom of expression and access to information, needs to be fully understood. There is a need for a theoretical framework to encompass this paradox. Political hybridity looks like a convenient one.2 Actually, the fact that political regimes such as the Moroccan one shift arbitrarily from liberalism to repression depending on the rulers’ mood or the political and economic forces at stake has raised a lot of questions in political science literature about the advent of full-fledged public spheres.3 Press freedom and practice is at the heart of this dilemma. So, how does the political context, considered semi-autocratic, semi-liberal or hybrid, affect the use of digital media? What are the hurdles citizen journalists are confronted by in such a configuration? Alternative media, born out of a mix of the globalisation of protest and cyber activism, look even more precarious in such a configuration. Still, mainly during the turmoil leading to 2011’s insurrections a combination of journalists and activists in Morocco chose to launch a new generation of online media in which there is a mix of anti-system information and marginal opinions. They consider these new spaces to be alternatives or even havens of freedom of expression distinct from the discredited traditional media, which is highly controlled and the victim of self-censorship. When we look at the life span of this digital activist media, we realise that they didn’t manage to overcome economic pressures and political repression. That’s why we decided in this paper to focus on the life cycles of two examples of alternative media (Lakome and Mamfakinch) and how they interact with the political and economic powers. 2 “The life span of alternative media in a hybrid configuration” Fadma Aït Mous & Driss Ksikes It is striking that both media websites we decided to scrutinise were created as side phenomena related to the so-called “Arab Spring”, which was hurriedly labelled a “social media revolution”. It is also noteworthy that both projects took their editorial orientation from the fact that citizens’ journalism could represent an alternative source of information and an echo for dissidence. The main difference between them is that one is led by professional journalists rejecting the paper media model and the other was created by activists and young political science students. Considering the nuances of each website, we’ll tackle each experience by itself and then compare the outcomes of both. Meanwhile, we’ll engage with the concept of “alternative media” and its different variations and see the extent to which they fit with these outlets. The method we used in order to describe and analyse these two cases is based mainly on online ethnography and interviews with the concerned actors. The main questions that will help us structure our analysis concern four main areas. First, how do alternative media editors and journalists deal with paradoxical laws and regulations in the national/territorial space and the international/extraterritorial/digital framework? Secondly, how do they manage interactions between professionalism and activism? Third, what are the manifestations of control, repression and self-limitation in their daily practices? Lastly, how do these media actors behave before, during and after the analysed experiences? Concepts and context Let’s first try to understand where we are when it comes to the terms and concepts used, the historical context in which actors interact and the local setting (Morocco) in which these media try to act. Sharing news online has long been a civil action, since before digital media were developed by professionals. The first symbolic act of what was then coined “alternative media” took place in 1999 in Seattle in reaction to the World Trade Organization’s annual conference. Alter-globalisation NGOs were the initiators of one of the first public websites dedicated to producing (thanks to activists and parallel networks) pieces of information that were rarely if at all shared by mainstream media outlets. Known, since then, as the Independent Media Center or Indymedia, it is defined by its founders as “a network of collectively run 3 “The life span of alternative media in a hybrid configuration” Fadma Aït Mous & Driss Ksikes media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth”.4 Alternative media is described as being produced “by and for citizens, with civic content” (Hadl, 2004), and the literature on it is quite prolific. Various labels are used to name such media: from “radical media” (Downing, 2001) to “citizens’ media” (Rodriguez, 2001) and from “critical media” (Fuchs, 2010) to “social movement media” (Atton, 2003). The researchers tackle the different aspects of these media in three premises, which Benjamin Ferron (2012: 137) has summarised: “First, alternative media producers and promoters are analyzed as challengers of the status quo, ‘heterodox’ agents producing and circulating media outside – or against – the ‘mainstream’ institutions, including, in particular, the state apparatus, the capitalist market, and the dominant media (heterodoxy/autonomy premise). Second, the organizations that promote these media are generally considered as representatives of ‘civil society’, working hand in hand to promote progressive social change (unity/cooperation premise). Third, alternative media are assumed to be produced ‘democratically’ by marginal, subaltern, minority groups of citizens, in order to ‘give voice to the voiceless’ in the public space and ‘empower’ counter- publics (democratic/grassroots premise)”. The normative aspect of such premises is obvious since scholars and social scientists are either close to these media activists or to their democratic aspirations. But such an implication hides the complexity of the phenomenon. During the last decade in Morocco, this activist model has not been reproduced as such. Actually, three main trends could sum up the emergence of online media in the Moroccan context. The first, from 2005 onwards, was first characterised by personal blogging then by social media mobilisation content. Both were produced by young activists pointing out corruption, clientelism and rent-seeking attitudes. Some of these citizen journalists would become frontline activists within the February 20th movement,5 but also the founding bloggers united under the flag of the pioneer Arab-speaking pure play, Hespress, launched in 2007. The second trend illustrates the enforced shift, starting in 2009, of independent journalists and editors 4 “The life span of alternative media in a hybrid configuration” Fadma Aït Mous & Driss Ksikes from paper to online media by launching their own new outlets. This is the epitome of a crisis of independent journalism, which stopped an unprecedented era of free press (1997–2007) through repression, unfair trials, economic pressure and then self- censorship. Finally, the third path that stems from both is a mitigated one, where professional and citizen journalists engage together with cyber activists on a common experience. Their motto is to broaden sources of information, produce anti-establishment narratives and reveal uncovered stories. How do they proceed? What are the hurdles they are confronted with? How do they manage to survive (or not) in a hybrid regime? Through lengthy interviews with the main stakeholders, the sociology of the actors and analysis of the historical, economic and political configuration in which they operate, this paper aims at understanding what is at stake for these alternative media during their endeavour to exist or survive. Lakome, a contested “refuge” Let’s first tackle the case of the news website Lakome. Quite interestingly, the label’s name refers both to “la com” (communication), and to the public, as the expression Lakoum in Arabic means “to you”, to the people. The baseline says “from here starts freedom”, which reveals the site’s main editorial orientation, considered by its initiators to be “independent” and by officials to be “dissident” or “oppositional”. It actually expresses what the site’s founder, the journalist Ali Anouzla, considers his ethical position: “to be free from any institutional or financial constraints”.6 The statement is definitely close to the Indymedia narrative, which defines itself as an alternative media outlet willing to “inspire people who continue to work

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