A B S T R A C T
The concept of organization still plays a significant role in capturing the social structures through which media activities are deployed, and it has a structural impact on the articulation of leadership. At the same time, the articulation of the concept of the (media) organization with the mainstream (media) has provoked substantial critiques. However dominant the mainstream media organizational logics still is, there have been two structural contestations of (some of) its basic premises. The first contestation is grounded in the sphere of alternative and community media organizations that introduced a different model of media organization. The second structural contestation of the mainstream media organizational model shifts the attention to another concept, namely community. The aim of this theoretical paper, grounded in democratic-participatory theory and organizational sociology, is to show the importance and diversity of organizational structures and leadership models in our media worlds.

A B S T R A C T
This text introduces a special issue stems from the debate that has been developed within the Cost Action ISO906 Transforming Audiences Transforming Societies (TATS) around the policy implications of scientific knowledge produced in the field of audience research. This special issue has been conceived as both a place to collect the reflections on social relevance of participatory theory (conducted within the Working Group 2 of TATS) and a chance to relaunch the debate addressing a wider public which is interested in the topics of academia’s social relevance and critical role but has not been involved before in TATS’ research activities. This two-folded rationale is reflected in the special issue’s structure that is divided into two sections. The first one, entitled "Building bridges", collects papers produced and discussed by TATS researchers. The second one, "Critique and social relevance", includes papers that were collected through an open call which asked for contributions analysing how the values of critique and social relevance are currently deployed in the contemporary research of communication and culture.

A B S T R A C T
This text introduces the "Past, future and change" book, which is a product of an ongoing intellectual ferment aimed to conceptualise not only processes of change within media, but also the role of media in processes of social change. It is an outcome of the intellectual work of the 2012 ECREA European media and communication doctoral Summer School and aims to promote the underlying idea of the summer school, which is to promote pluralism of theoretical and methodological approaches to studying contemporary (mediated) communication and to establish bridges and dialogue with these diverse and often still culturally enclosed approaches. The book occupies a liminal position in the field of academic books as it presents both work in progress and completed research. It presents a significant part of the intellectual work of the Summer School, but at the same time it cannot be reduced to a format of conference proceedings since most chapters significantly differ from the work presented at the Summer School. Past, future and change: Contemporary analysis of evolving media scapes is a reviewed book, a result of collective endeavour of its many editors, who paid particular effort in supporting the six chapters provided by emerging scholars – the Summer School students.

A B S T R A C T
Quality is a pervasive notion that can be found in a wide variety of societal domains. Within the cultural domain, its intrinsic articulation with aesthetics, beauty, civilisation and culture as such has produced a Gordian knot that is virtually impossible to untie. In this chapter, quality is defined as a discourse, in line with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory. Their theoretical model provides a toolbox that can be used to analyse the articulation of the quality discourses within the dynamics of fixity and fluidity, emphasising the contingent while allowing sufficient space for its (temporary) fixation. The first part of this chapter will focus on two quality discourses that can be considered hegemonic and universalised: the aesthetic and the professional quality discourse. The second part of this text uses a small group of interviews with community media producers in Austria and Switzerland to argue that, through the participatory cultures of these radio stations, other (alternative) quality discourses can be observed and theoretised. The producers first of all deploy a democratic quality discourse and a rearticulated (deprofessionalised) professional quality discourse, but they also use a discourse on quality which can be termed negotiated quality. The interviews with the radio producers show that the universalised quality discourses can be deconstructed without destroying the notion of quality, opening up the way for rethinking it.

A B S T R A C T
This chapter first focuses on the resistant modernist fantasy of the media professional as Author, and then move on to its still modernist counterweight, the democratic-populist fantasy of the death of the Author. The strong disconnection of these fantasies with the present-day cultural-democratic configuration, characterised by a more post/late/liquid-modernist logic, allows for the articulation of a third fantasy, which foregrounds participation, but reframes it to increase its alignment with this post/late/liquid-modernist culture through the recognition of difference and conflict by placing it within an agonist framework.

A B S T R A C T
The popularization of the internet, with all its potentials for interaction and participation fed into the cultural democratization argument, combined with the belief that these changes were new. This claim for novelty is highly problematic, as it tends to ignore the history of cultural participation, which stretches out much further than utopian ICT theories want us to believe. There is also a tendency towards an individualized interpretation of the social, which leads to a downplaying of societal structures, including the importance of organisational structures in providing cultural elites with safe havens, and the importance of discursive structures like professional identities and audience identities. This texts combines both critiques, by looking at the 20th century history of participation within the cultural realm. Arguably, the arts played a significant role in producing these cultural-democratic discourses and practices, and for that reason this article will first discuss this history, only to move towards the debates on museums and participation afterwards. This historical overview shows that one should be careful with launching claims of novelty when discussing cultural participation. It also allows me to emphasize the importance of discursive structures as conditions of possibility for the organization of participation.

A B S T R A C T
This book is a product of an ongoing intellectual ferment aimed to conceptualise not only processes of change within media, but also the role of media in processes of social change. It is an outcome of the intellectual work of the 2012 ECREA European media and communication doctoral Summer School and aims to promote the underlying idea of the summer school, which is to promote pluralism of theoretical and methodological approaches to studying contemporary (mediated) communication and to establish bridges and dialogue with these diverse and often still culturally enclosed approaches. The book occupies a liminal position in the field of academic books as it presents both work in progress and completed research. It presents a significant part of the intellectual work of the Summer School, but at the same time it cannot be reduced to a format of conference proceedings since most chapters significantly differ from the work presented at the Summer School. Past, future and change: Contemporary analysis of evolving media scapes is a reviewed book, a result of collective endeavour of its many editors, who paid particular effort in supporting the six chapters provided by emerging scholars – the Summer School students.

A B S T R A C T
The article takes the debates on structure and agency as a starting point to emphasise the importance of finding a balanced approach towards the discursive and the material in these debates. Through a critical reading of Giddens’ structuration theory and Castells’ network society theory, the tendencies in sociological (and communication and media studies) theory to render agency too present, to privilege the material over the discursive, and to fixate and permanently sediment all four concepts, is highlighted. The article then reverts to the notion of “discursive structure” as elaborated in Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory to further unravel the complexities of the relationships between these four categories, while at the same time guaranteeing that the cultural-discursive dimensions of structure gain more visibility. The workings of this more fluid and immaterial model of discursive structures is illustrated by focussing on the media organisation, as one of the points where the discursive and the material, and structure and agency meet. Through the lens of the media organisation we can see how agency and structure are both located at the level of the material and the discursive, and how the material and the discursive both have structure and agency.

A B S T R A C T
Podrecznik Media alternatywne przedstawia zagadnienia zwiazane z powstawaniem, funkcjonowaniem, a takze oddzialywaniem mediów alternatywnych jako nowego sposobu komunikowania w odmienionej przez rozwój technologii przestrzeni medialnej. Wykorzystano tu teoretyczne ujecia sluzace do badania mediów alternatywnych zobrazowane dodatkowo analiza studiów przypadku. Autorzy odpowiadaja na kluczowe pytania: Czym sa media alternatywne; Jaka role odgrywaja media alternatywne w pluralistycznych, demokratycznych spoleczenstwach; Jakie sa podobienstwa i róznice miedzy mediami alternatywnymi, wspólnotowymi, mediami spoleczenstwa obywatelskiego i mediami rizomatycznymi; Jak media alternatywne dzialaja w praktyce. Media alternatywne to wartosciowa lektura dla studentów medioznawstwa, dziennikarstwa i komunikacji, badaczy, naukowców oraz dziennikarzy.

A B S T R A C T
Death itself is a signifier that tries to capture human decay, and its meaning consists of a series of elements that are often taken for granted, such as end/cessation/termination, negativity, irreversibility, inescapability and undesirability. At the same time, closer scrutiny of these articulations shows the contingency of the discourse of death, with almost every discursive element opening up a range of gaps, complexities and unfixities. In order to unravel the meanings of the articulation of the discourse on death, and to show some of its complexities, we will use discourse theory (and mainly Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) variation) as the theoretical backbone of our analysis, which is firmly rooted in a secular position. This analysis will also allow us to illustrate (part of) the workings of discourse-theoretical analysis (or DTA – see Carpentier & De Cleen, 2007) in the development of a secondary theoretical framework, which can be used, together with discourse theory itself (as primary theoretical framework), for a variety of analysis, including the study of media texts (Van Brussel, 2011).

A B S T R A C T
The Summer School was established in the early 1990s by a consortium of ten (Western) European universities, initiated by the Universities of Stendhal (Grenoble, France) and Westminster (UK). From then on, these participating universities have organised annual summer schools for communication studies PhD students, which lasted for one or two weeks and took place in a wide range of locations, including Grenoble, Lund, Barcelona, London Helsinki and Tartu. In 2010, the Summer School moved for the first time to the Department of Media and Communication Studies of the University of Ljubljana. In 2011, it ran from 14 to 27 August. This chapter discusses the pedagogical principles of the Summer School, and introduces this year's Summer School book.

A B S T R A C T
Death is frequently seen as the ultimate manifestation of materiality. Without denying this materiality, this article will investigate the discursive character of death, and its contingent nature, through the lens of Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory. First, the core elements of the (Western) discourse of death, such as end/cessation/termination, negativity, irreversibility, inescapability, and undesirability, in combination with life as death’s constitutive outside, will be analysed, showing the specificity of this discourse of death. The contingency of death is argued further from a more genealogical stance, through the changes over time in the articulation of death and good death. Finally, the political nature of the discourse of death is illustrated by an analysis of end-of-life debates and the struggle between the hospice and the right to die social movements over the exact articulation of a good death. The article concludes by pointing to the necessary and constitutive failure of discourse to capture the materiality of death.

A B S T R A C T
The concept of a good death is central to contemporary discourses on death and dying; it is also frequently used in contexts of end-of-life decision-making. We argue that in and through the medical-revivalist discourse, which challenges the idea that curative treatment is necessary beneficial and constructs death as something familiar, a good death is discursively organised around two nodal clusters: control, autonomy and dignity, and awareness and heroism. Moreover, we also argue that - within this framework of the medical-revivalist discourse - political contestation exists over the articulation of these nodal points. Especially two social movements, the right to die movement and the palliative care movement, have been at the forefront of the political struggle over the good death. In this article, we use a discourse-theoretical approach to develop an analytical model of the construction of the good death and the present-day political struggles over these constructions. This model then allows us to identify and analyse the constructions of the good death in the North Belgian newspaper coverage on three 2008 euthanasia cases. Using discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) (Carpentier & De Cleen, 2007), our analysis shows that the articulations of the right to die variation are privileged in the newspaper coverage. There is a celebration of the extraordinariness and heroism of the dying subject who autonomously chooses on how and when to die and who preferably dies in a state of full awareness so that he can die with dignity. This privileging is often accompanied by the symbolic annihilation of many other ways of dying. Consequentially, the richness of ways of dying that characterize contemporary social realities becomes curtailed in the analysed newspaper representations.

A B S T R A C T
Within the Web 2.0 hype, participation (again) became a key signifier, promising the fulfilment of our democratic fantasies. Looking at the history of mediated participation we can distinguish a number of these upsurges, like the 1970s debates about the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), combined with the rise of the Community (and Alternative) Media Movement. On a positive note, these increased forms of participation within the sphere of the media can be seen as part of what Mouffe has called the democratic revolution, which affects all societal spheres (and not just politics): "… the effects of the democratic revolution can be analysed in the arts, theory, and all aspects of culture in general …" (Mouffe, 1997: 11). Slowly but surely the impact of this 200-year democratic revolution has generated a more egalitarian society, and has facilitated (in the case of mediated participation) citizens to exert the communication rights. On the downside, the democratisation of democracy is a slow process that has not undone (and will not undo) all societal power imbalances. This also affects the nature of participation itself, as its definition (and its intensity) is part of the societal-political struggle between minimalist and maximalist versions of democracy. Quite often the contemporary celebratory uses of participation (implicitly) subscribe to a more minimalist ideological-democratic position, black boxing participation's diversities of meanings and intensities, and ignoring its role within the democratic revolution. Through these logics, participation risks becoming an object of celebration, trapped in a reductionist discourse of novelty, detached from the reception of its audiences and decontextualised from its political-ideological, communicative-cultural and communicative-structural contexts. This chapter aims to add to the debates on the democratic revolution and the political-ideological significance of mediated participation by comparing the reception of two North Belgian participatory media products. One of these case studies is based on the "new" world of a YouTube-like online platform called 16plus, the second case study is based on the "old" concept of access television in a 2002 TV programme called Barometer. In both cases, the reception study shows little enthusiasm or downright rejection from the part of their audiences, although the focus group members still use a maximalist (and almost contradictory) discourse of media democracy, and fiercely critique the mainstream media and their professionals. Through an analysis of these multi-layered audience receptions, this chapter will show that participatory practices are not unconditionally appreciated by audience members, but subject to specific conditions of possibility. Albeit in different degrees, these case studies show the importance of quality and social relevance for the evaluation of participatory practices.

A B S T R A C T
Journalism scholars have noted a steady rise of skepticism among the public in the latter half of the past century. “The passing of the ‘High Modernism’” of journalism as Daniel Hallin (1992: 14) famously put it, shows in a loss of faith in journalists (Kovach & Rosenstiel: 41) and a seeming dissolution of journalists’ covenant with the public (Cappella and Jamieson, 1997). But the era of ‘postmodernism’ (McQuail, 1994) or ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) in journalism also fundamentally impacted upon journalists’ self-perception – or the trust they have in their profession and their own practices. The “absence of a sense of doubt or contradiction,” (Hallin: idem) on the part of journalists has in the past decades been challenged in the face of such developments as commercialization, cross-media mergers and the rise of new media that deprive the journalist of his/her privileged position as “society’s truth-teller” (McNair 1998: 71). Since the above mentioned developments have contributed to the erosion of the status (and thus legitimation) of journalists (Hallin, 2006) and have evoked the claim of ‘the end of journalism’ in a traditional sense, we may expect journalists to invest more effort in generating trust in their profession both for the audience and themselves. In order to analyze these strategies we will take a discourse-theoretical perspective on journalism that regards the latter as a discourse centered on a number of privileged signifiers that are connected up in a hegemonic discursive formation. This theoretical model –mainly opened up by Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe and Žižek – allows us to analyze how this journalistic hegemonic discursive formation deals with so-called dislocations, i.e. events that destabilize and de-legitimize the dominant discourse by introducing elements that cannot be domesticated within its framework. More in particular we will be looking at how a number of the core journalistic values are being discredited in the era of ‘liquid modernity’. Examples are the broad changes in the possibilities for circulating news (that challenge journalist’s autonomy), in the attitude towards the representation of reality (that contest journalist’s modernist bias towards truth (Zelizer 2004:112)) and the introduction of commercial imperatives in news production (that delegitimize journalist’s claims on bringing service to the public). The actions journalists engage in as a means to deal with these changes and reaffirm their own status and professionalism in the face of challenge have been researched in a number of ways. These have, for instance, been investigated from a macro-perspective as actions of ‘paradigmatic repair’ (Reese 1990) that are directed at reaffirming the ideological model(s) of journalism (see Carpentier 2008 en 2009). Tightly interlinked with this are studies that address the meso-level of the newspaper institution (see Reese 1990; Tuchman 1972). This article proposes to look at the normalizing strategies that are at work at the level of the journalistic identity. In order to analyze these strategies we will turn to a specific field, namely that of online news, as this is one of the sites where the threats sketched out above have forcefully come to the surface. It is exactly at such moments of threat that the truth-claims and strategies of generating trust are most clearly at work. By investigating online journalism, we wish to shed light on three discursive strategies employed in reaction to these threats: A first strategy is the marginalization of rivaling media (through the logics of the constitutive outside) which disarticulates online journalists from the discourse of ‘good’ and ‘professional’ journalism. Secondly, mainstream journalism has tried to maintain its professional identity by normalizing the mainstream online environment which entails limiting the possibilities offered by the online environment and incorporating alternative voices in the mainstream model. Thirdly, we witness a rearticulation of the nodal points embedded in the mainstream discourse. We may here think of a tendency towards foregrounding the journalist as individual and thus of reinforcing his claims on trustworthiness. Of importance here is also the increasingly interpretative role taken on by the journalist (Hallin 1992: 19) and the growing importance of the public image of journalists in blogs and other writings of an autobiographical nature. We will contend that these all link up with a reinforcement of journalistic myths that (re)surface in the face of ‘the end of journalism’.

A B S T R A C T
Denken, communicatie en taal zijn sociaal, cultureel, politiek, economisch, … Ze kunnen niet van onze sociale wereld uitgesloten worden en dienen als dusdanig bestudeerd te worden. Vaak vinden we wel auteurs die lippendienst betonen aan het discursieve luik van onze maatschappelijke realiteit, om dan vervolgens de blik te richten op de meer 'echte' (lees materiële) aspecten van deze realiteit. Wat we echter nodig hebben is een reeks van radicaal discursieve benaderingen, gepositioneerd als een integraal onderdeel van de maatschappelijke realiteit, die de idee dat het discursieve belangrijk is als uitgangspunt nemen en consequent doordenken. Bovendien leidt het onderschatten van het discursieve ook tot het negeren van één van de belangrijkste locaties van machtsontplooiing. Het denken als locatie van macht, hegemonische projecten die dit denken proberen vast te leggen en in te kapselen, illusies van consensus en post-politieke projecten die deze illusie ondersteunen, maar ook het altijd aanwezige verzet, en de beweeglijkheid en contingentie van discours, zijn wezenlijke objecten van analyse en verdwijnen onder de radar als het discursieve niet voldoende aandacht krijgt. Daarom is de kritische studie van discours ook zo belangrijk; het is een instrument om, zoals Eduard Said het zo mooi uitdrukte, waarheid tegen macht te spreken; een taak die intellectuelen dienen te koesteren.
A B S T R A C T in English
Thought, communication and language are social, cultural, political, economical, … They cannot be excluded from our social worlds, and need to be studies as such. Often we find authors to provide lip service to the discursive component of our societal reality, to then aim the gaze at the more ‘real’ (read material) aspects of this reality. What we need is a series of radical discursive approaches, positioned as an integral part of the societal reality, that take the idea that the discursive matters as starting point and think it through consistently. In addition, the underestimation of the discursive implies ignoring one of the most significant locations of power. Ideas as location of power, hegemonic projects that try to fixate and encapsulate these ideas, illusions of consensus and post-political projects that sustain these illusions, but also the always-present resistance and the mutability and contingency of discourse are substantial objects of analysis that disappear from the radar screen if the discursive doesn’t receive enough attention. That is why the critical study of discourse is that important; it is an instrument to, as Said expressed it so eloquently, speak truth to power; a task that intellectuals need to cherish.

A B S T R A C T
Participation is a concept that is being used in a wide variety of fields, and that has obtained an evenly large range of meanings. This article attempts first to ground participation in democratic theory, which allows introducing the distinction between minimalist and maximalist forms of participation. In the second part of the article, a broad definition of the politics will be used to transcend to logics of institutionalized politics, and to emphasize that the distribution of power in society is a dimension of the social that permeates every possible societal field. Both discussions are then used to describe the key characteristics of participation, and to increase the concept’s theoretical foundation. The article then zooms in on one of these characteristics, namely the difference between access, interaction and participation, as this distinction allows further sharpening the key meanings attributed to participation as a political process where the actors involved in decision-making processes are positioned towards each other through power relationships that are (to an extent) egalitarian.

A B S T R A C T
Alternative media theory aims to capture an important component of the third (non-state and non-market) media sector, but it also has a number of disadvantages. The temporality of alternativeness, the homogenizing effect of the alternative-mainstream binary which excludes fluidity and diversity and the resulting media-centric position all form structural constraints of this alternative media approach. This article argues that while the alternative media approach is valuable, it can be strengthened by combining it with a rhizomatic media approach, which allows us to focus on three aspects: their role as at the crossroads of civil society, their elusiveness, and their interconnections and linkages with market and state. The combination of the alternative and rhizomatic media approaches is then applied to two Brussels radio stations, Radio Panik and Radio Air Libre, in order to show how they connect a number of civil society (and other) organizations, act as a nodal point and construct linkages with market and state. Through an analysis of the websites of the radio stations and programmes, and through an analysis of 10 broadcasts of Passe Muraille, one of Radio Air Libre’s programmes, the surprising richness of their civil society networks, in both numbers and diversity, is mapped. Moreover, a second mapping shows how both radio stations engage with market and state. The analyses of the two rhizomatic-alternative radio stations show us that the third way, navigating between market and state, still persists, but at the same time the rhizomatic approach allows us to incorporate more of the complexity of these media organizations.

A B S T R A C T
The popularization of ‘new’ Internet-based media has generated much optimism about the social and participatory-democratic potentialities of these media, leading to predictions about the demise of the mass communication paradigm, and its replacement by a many-to-many communicative paradigm. But as happened before, the reappraisal of participation also produced a number of theoretical, conceptual and empirical problems. Participation became (at least partially) an object of celebration, trapped in a reductionist discourse of novelty, detached from the reception of its audiences and decontextualized from its political-ideological, communicativecultural and communicative-structural contexts. These celebratory perspectives on participation cover how some of the basic concepts of the mass communication paradigm are still very much alive, providing the discursive frameworks for the reception of old and new media products. This article aims to show the persistence of (a number of components of) the mass communication paradigm through an analysis of the reception of two north Belgian participatory media products. One of these case studies is based on the ‘new’ world of a YouTube-like online platform called 16plus; the second case study is based on the ‘old’ concept of access television in a 2002 TV programme called Barometer. Through an analysis of these multilayered audience receptions, this article shows that participatory practices are not unconditionally appreciated by audience members, but are subject to specific conditions of possibility that are still embedded within the mass communication paradigm. Albeit in different degrees, these case studies show the importance of two ‘old’ key concepts – professional quality and social relevance – for these audiences’ evaluation of participatory practices.

A B S T R A C T
This article looks at the articulations of the subject position ‘ordinary people’ by analysing focus group discussions with audience members, and interviews with participants in a north Belgian audience discussion programme called Jan Publiek. In this talk show ordinary people are granted access to a prime-time, live television programme, in order to discuss one specific issue each broadcast. This feature positions Jan Publiek among what have been called ‘audience discussion programmes’ or ‘vox-pop’ programmes (in contrast to elite talk shows). The article focuses on the construction of the ordinary person as a complex and multi-layered subject position. We argue that this identity is relational, and positioned towards an alliance of power-blocs consisting of celebrities, experts, politicians and media professionals. Through this relational positioning, ordinary people become articulated in Jan Publiek as authentic, but also as unorganized, apolitical, powerless, unknown, spontaneous and unknowledgeable. Lefebvre’s distinction between the everyday and everydayness is then used to evaluate the political and emancipatory capacity of Jan Publiek and audience discussion programmes in general, which are sometimes criticized for their commodified and apolitical nature, but on other occasions valued for their democratic potential.

A B S T R A C T
This article examines the role of the internet in 2003 Iraq war from the perspective of the challenges it poses to the practices and formats of mainstream journalism and to the hegemonic articulations of war. Theoretically centralizing the concept of hegemony (as a network of interlocking but still distinct hegemonies), it positions blogs as alternative media by contrasting them to mainstream journalistic routines in situations of war and the tendency of mainstream media to essentialise the other/the enemy. Three very distinct cases are examined. First, the Iraqi blogger Salam Pax; second, the so-called mil-blogs and third the role of the internet in the distribution and archiving of the Abu Ghraib photographs. In each case, the discourses being produced are analysed in terms of the extent to which they challenge the hegemony of mainstream journalism and of the ideological model of war. While blogs certainly provide an alternative space for the production of different and counter-hegemonic narratives of war, approaching these blogs as inherently alternative and counter-hegemonic is deemed too simplistic. Some blogs re-enforce hegemony, and others are appropriated within the mainstream precisely because of their personalised and distinct narrative. At the same time this appropriation can also lead to hegemony striking back, disciplining the blogosphere or including some and excluding others from the mainstream public space.

A B S T R A C T
Temptation Island only seems to feed the banal voyeurism of its viewers and to offer the participants the opportunity to derive pleasure from their stay and/or to increase their celebrity status. At the same time, popular culture is an important site for the societal construction of meaning. It is a place where definitions are offered on what our societies accept or not, tolerate or not, and sanction or not. Television programmes such as Temptation Island are microcosms allowing us to examine our boundaries as well as elements in our culture that we take for granted. It is in particular the emphasis on human relationships, gender and sexuality —core elements of society— that makes Temptation Island relevant research material. The analysis of the television text and the reception of this text (on online forums) shows the cultural importance and gendered nature of discourses on fidelity, honesty, physical beauty and on the holy rules of the game. It also shows how the (male) viewers enter into a social contract with the programme, in order to ogle the (female) bodies, to derive pleasure from the failure and misfortunes of the participants, and to tolerate emotional abuse in the name of the game.

A B S T R A C T
In contrast to the informational city, the communicative city model is characterized by a normative stance on a series of social, political, ethical and spatial dimensions. Building on an expanded version of Kunzmann’s description of the communicative city, this article emphasizes the importance of alternative media organizations for developing the (concept of the) communicative city, both at the discursive and the practice-based level. In other words, the existence of urban alternative media and their defining features (where the participatory and the translocal are highlighted) contribute to the development of the discourse of the communicative city, which is one of the representational regimes that aim to produce the city, its inhabitants and its communities. The material existence of these urban alternative media simultaneously bears evidence that the communicative city already exists, although some of its key practices remain hidden in the belly of the city, often ignored by the official city cultures. This article aims to revisit alternative media theory in order to show the importance of this belly of the city for the city. The article starts with an overview of four distinct approaches towards alternative media (the community media model, the model of alternativeness, the civil society media model and the rhizomatic media model), which show the importance of the participatory and the translocal for alternative media theory and for the communicative city.

A B S T R A C T
When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published an elaborate version of their discourse theory in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), they were met with fierce resistance by a unified front of traditional Marxists and anti-poststructuralists. The debates on post-Marxism dominated much of the book's reception. This focus, combined with discourse theory's rather abstract nature, its lack of clear methodological guidelines, and its more natural habitat of Political Studies, caused discourse theory to remain confined to this realm of Political Studies, despite the broad ideological definition of the political preferred by the authors. This article aims to revisit discourse theory and bring it into the realm of Media Studies. A necessary condition to enhance discourse theory's applicability in Media Studies is the re-articulation of discourse theory into discourse theoretical analysis (DTA). DTA's claim for legitimacy is supported in this article by two lines of argument. Firstly, a comparison with Critical Discourse Analyses (CDA) at the textual and contextual level allow us to flesh out the similarities - and more importantly - the differences between CDA and DTA. Secondly, DTA's applicability is demonstrated by putting it to work in a case study, which focuses on the articulation of audience participation through televisional practices. Both lines of argument aim to illustrate the potential, the adaptability and the legitimacy of DTA's move into media studies.

A B S T R A C T
The concept of 'community media' (CM) has proved to be, in its long theoretical and empirical tradition, highly elusive. This theoretical problem necessitates the use of different approaches to the definition of CM, which will allow for a complementary emphasis on different aspects of the identity of CM. This article uses a combination of four theoretical approaches as starting point: CM as serving the community, CM as an alternative to the mainstream, CM as part of civil society and CM as rhizome.
This article then focuses on the fourth approach to analyze a project that aims to broaden the communicative rhizome by creating an on-line database, which allow for the exchange of locally produced content beyond the confinements of locality. RadioSwap enables program-makers all over the world to upload their content and/or download, listen to and re-broadcast content produced by others. Although still limited in its capacities, this database does allow produced media discourses to circulate, and offer an embryonic form of translocalism and socio-communicative change.

A B S T R A C T
Chantal Mouffe’s political philosophy has been influential in a variety of domains, including sociology, cultural studies, media studies, law, art, literary criticism, and journalism studies. By combining Gramsci’s focus on hegemony with post-structuralist theory she has developed -in collaboration with Ernesto Laclau- a sophisticated perspective on the political that intersects with all aspects of society, including the role and functioning of journalism. Her emphasis on the productive role of hegemony and conflict in society combined with her plea for a radical pluralist democracy, open a wide range of new perspectives for journalism studies. We present an overview of Mouffe’s work set against a recent interview with her, in which we discuss, among other things, the potential diversity of contingent journalistic identities, ranging between being complicit with hegemonic socio-political projects, and safe-guarding or even deepening democratic institutions, including itself.

A B S T R A C T
The review essay deals with two recent publications on media-war relationships: Tumber and Palmer's 'Media at war. The Iraq crisis' (2004) and Thussu and Freedman's 'War and the media. Reporting conflict 24/7' (2003/2005). Two questions are raised in this essay. First, is it still relevant to look back at two publications on media-war relationships when (at least some of) the wars they focus on have fundamentally altered? And even more importantly, is there a convincing reason left for actually reading them? Answering these questions allows for a more fundamental reflection on the importance of academic activities in relationship to issues of media and war. Three answers are suggested: the importance and necessity of documenting, analysing and archiving war, the facilitation of academic and societal dialogue on issues of war, and the analyses of the political, economical, cultural, technological and ideological contexts that transcend singular wars. Especially the last domain is considered crucial. Although each war is characterised by a high degree of specificity and contingency, which unavoidably influences and alters the media-war-military relationships, the contextual analyses enable uncovering the presence of more structural aspects in these relationships. More specifically, these contextual analyses teach us most about the role of power and ideology in the representational processes that deal with war. These analyses again show the powerlessness of media and media professionals to escape from the dichotomised ideological model of war and from the (direct or indirect) legitimisation of what Knightley had termed 'the institution of war'.

A B S T R A C T
This article uses key notions of the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe to analyze the identity of the media professional. Within their post-structural framework, this identity is seen as over-determined, contingent and constructed but at the same time subjected to a hegemonic articulation, based on four nodal points: objectivity, autonomy, management of resources and employee–employer relations. Combined with a theoretical discussion on the (counter-)hegemonic articulations, this allows for the field of discursivity that surrounds the identity of the media professional to be (re)constructed, resulting in four dimensions that offer (potential) points of identification. This field of discursivity is then used (and put to the test) as a series of sensitizing concepts for the analysis of the seven phone-in broadcasts the program Ter Zake (on VRT – the North Belgian public broadcasting company) has organized, illustrating both the contingency of the identity of the media professional and the rigidity of the hegemonic articulation.

Key Words: Audience discussion program, current affairs program, discourse theory, hegemony, identity, journalism, media professional, nodal points, objectivity, phone-in.

A B S T R A C T
The Video Nation project is one of the BBC’s recent major contributions to stimulating audience participation within mainstream media. This project (cl)aims to maintain a balanced power relationship between participants and members of the production team. Despite its transformation from a television setting to a web-based ‘online community and archive’ (although Video Nation partially returned to television in 2003), this project still has the ambition to give people the opportunity to represent themselves and their daily life. At the same time, it signifies the multilayered culture of ‘ordinary people’ and the cultural diversity within the British nation. The analysis illustrates the complex nature of audience participation in the mainstream media as, in contrast to community media, it becomes necessary to find and maintain an equal power balance between participants and media professionals in a structurally-biased institutional context. The power play that is seen at work in a highly fluid and contingent context creates the need for constant negotiation and care in order to protect the vulnerable power equilibrium between media professionals and participants. Crucial in this process is the participatory attitude of the media professionals, whose identity is no longer solely built on being a gatekeeper and producer of content, but also on gate-opening and facilitating the creation of content.

Key Words: audience, ordinary people, power, self-representation, television, World Wide Web.

I N T R O D U C T I O N
The debates on a new public remit tend - not surprisingly - to focus on the different aspects of the public broadcasting service. Though legitimate questions originate from this focus, this article shifts the emphasis towards another group of media that can (potentially) play an important public role: community media (CM). Because of the complexity of CM, which is characterised by the tension between the diversity and the specificity of these organisations, a multi-theoretical approach is used, combining four theoretical frameworks. The combination of these frameworks not only results in a more elaborate analysis of the identity of CM, highlighting the importance and the vulnerability of these CM-organisations, but also allows emphasising the need for a series of remedying strategies. These strategies are not only aimed at improving the position of CM, but are also oriented towards the re-conceptualisation of convergence from a technologically determined articulation to an articulation that centralises the democratic quality of public life.

I N T R O D U C T I O N
The concept of 'community media' has proved to be, in its long theoretical and empirical tradition, highly elusive. The multiplicity of media organizations that carry this name has caused most mono-theoretical approaches to focus on certain characteristics, while ignoring other aspects of the identity of community media. This theoretical problem necessitates the use of different approaches to the definition of community media, which will allow for a complementary emphasis on different aspects of the identity of community media. This article firstly aims to combine four theoretical approaches in order to capture both the diversity and specificity of these community media and to show their importance. This article also claims that antagonism-used within the frame of the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985)-plays a crucial role in the identity of community media. From the discourse-theoretical viewpoint, community media can be seen as the condensation of the attempt to offer an alternative for a wide range of hegemonic discourses on communication, media, economics, organizational structures, politics and democracy. Again, the four approaches will be used to analyse this broad range of alternative and hegemonic discourses. It is subsequently claimed that this antagonism towards state and market and the resistance against a multitude of hegemonic discourses has left the community media movement in a position of discursive isolation. The lack of strategic alliances has created the conditions of possibility for the muting of the democratic media discourse that is disseminated by these community media. The (organizational) bodies-in a Foucauldian sense-through which these discourses could function, disappeared. Putting the fourth (rhizomatic) approach to the forefront nevertheless offers the opportunity of a rearticulation from an antagonistic position towards an agonistic position-as Mouffe (1999a, p. 755) calls it-where the notion of pluralism enables the recognition of both the diversity of the media landscape and specificity of the different media organizations within this media landscape. This rearticulation based on a more fluid community media identity would enable these media to actively establish different types of linkages with (segments of) the state and/or the market-within loosing their proper identity and becoming incorporated and/or assimilated-using the renewed (political) interest for civil society and for revitalizing the public sphere to their benefit. Despite its importance, the fourth approach needs to remain firmly encapsulated within a multi-theoretical combination of approaches in order to capture the specificity and diversity of community media.

A B S T R A C T
In dit artikel wordt in een eerste deel een analysemodel ontwikkeld op basis van de combinatie tussen theorieën die zich enerzijds richten op de traditionele media en anderzijds op de nieuwe media. Beide theoretische stromingen maken echter op een verschillende manier gebruik van de concepten toegang, interactie en participatie, waardoor een geïntegreerde benadering zich opdringt. Dit laat toe deze concepten elk een (duidelijk afgebakende) plaats toe te wijzen binnen eenzelfde analysemodel. Het startpunt van deze analyse is het discours van de digitale kloof, dat sterk de klemtoon legt op (een specifieke articulatie van) toegang. Via de kritieken op dit discours wordt het concept participatie uit de participatieve communicatie geïntroduceerd en behandeld. Tot slot wordt één van de 'buzzwords' uit de ICT-theorie - namelijk interactie of interactiviteit - besproken, wat zal toestaan deze drie noties in één model te integreren. In een tweede deel wordt dit zogenaamde TIP-model gebruikt om een concrete gevalstudie te evalueren. Het geselecteerde BBC-project Video Nation is gericht op het in beeld brengen van de alledaagse maar meerlagige leefcultuur van 'gewone mensen', op het representeren van de culturele diversiteit binnen de Britse natie en op het nastreven van een evenwichtige machtsrelatie tussen participanten en redactieleden. In het besluit wordt ten eerste gepleit voor het (verder) stimuleren van de participatieve houding bij media professionals, zowel op micro-, meso- als op macroniveau, waarbij voldoende aandacht besteed wordt aan de politieke, sociale, artistieke en culturele dimensies die verweven zijn met het alledaagse; aan het situeren van 'het publiek' binnen hun gemeenschappen en organisaties; en aan het opstellen van participantrechten. Ten tweede wordt de voor Video Nation kenmerkende projectmatige benadering op de voorgrond geplaatst, aangezien dit een meer structurele benadering mogelijk maakt en meer ruimte creëert voor de geïntegreerde aanwending van verschillende mediaplatformen.

A B S T R A C T
In this article the theoretical notions of power developed by Giddens and Foucault are combined to serve as a framework for the analysis of the participation of 20 ‘ordinary people’ in Jan Publiek, an audience discussion programme on north Belgian public service television (VRT). In this analysis the positive/generative and negative/repressive aspects of power – united in the Giddean ‘dialectics of control’ – and especially the management of the participants in the pre-broadcast, broadcast and post-broadcasting phase and the resistance this management provokes, are brought into focus. The conclusion returns to the Foucauldian question of the (local) overall effect and the production of discourses on participation and ‘ordinary people’. Although the ‘ordinary people’ actually deliver a major contribution to the realization of the programme Jan Publiek, they are also confronted with the management of the production team, putting their participation into perspective.

Key Words: audience participation, confessional and disciplinary tech-nologies, dialectics of control, ordinary people, power, resistance, television.

I N T R O D U C T I O N
This article contains a reflection on a fundamental claim made by the production teams of two North Belgian (or Flemish) audience discussion programmes Jan Publiek and De Eeuwige Strijd: by allowing 'ordinary people' to participate in their programme, they claim they facilitate and empower 'ordinary people' to discuss social, moral and political topics in public. In order to evaluate this claim a discursive and social constructivist approach will be used: participation is to be considered a floating signifier, open to articulation. (Laclau 1985: 113) In this article it is contended - following Hall's, Fairclough's and Van Dijk's position that mass media themselves can be analysed as a discourse (Hall 1980: 128-138; Van Dijk 1985: 5; Fairclough 1995: 57-68) - that Jan Publiek and De Eeuwige Strijd contain a discursive articulation of participation. In other words, the programmes Jan Publiek and De Eeuwige Strijd themselves are a discourse on participation. Referring to Pateman's definition of participation, the division of power within the programme is used to analyse the articulation of participation. (Pateman 1972: 71) The major questions then become how the different power relations function, how within the dialectics of control voices are managed, power is shared and unequal power relations are resisted, and what discourse on the participation of 'ordinary people' the combination of power and resistance eventually produces. The empirical part of this artcile is based on a selection of data that were collected in the 3ADP-project , but only the data related to the second series of Jan Publiek, broadcast from September until December 1997 and the first series of De Eeuwige Strijd, broadcast from January until May 1998, will be discussed. Two specific emissions on racism will be analysed more in-depth: the Jan Publiek emission on the 'riots' in Anderlecht (Brussels) was broadcast on 13 November 1997, the De Eeuwige Strijd broadcast on racism was broadcast on 12 January 1998. A specific software package (ISI's Profile Timer©, hereafter referred to as PRT) is used in order to facilitate the content analysis of these two emissions and to visualize the findings. The analysis of the Jan Publiek emissions is supplemented with an analysis of the interviews with the two production teams and with the 20 panel members of Jan Publiek.