Good News from the Third World. The Rise and Fall of Alternatives in Global Journalism, 1960s - 1990s

• Applicant: Dr. Leonie Wolters
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548644438

Decolonisation brought major changes to international journalism, as more nations and individuals wanted to bring their perspectives to attention within the global news system. These interlinked phenomena have so far received little scholarly attention in a global context. Self-styled ‘alternative news agencies’ provide a window into key developments of the era because they engaged journalists from especially the Global South to report on issues and countries they claimed had been ignored by established news agencies with colonial legacies. This project focuses on the Inter Press Service (Rome, 1964 - present), particularly its English- and French-language 'Third World' branch, and the Gemini News Service (London, 1967 - 2002). Both agencies’ operations involved correspondents and subscribers across mainly Western Europe, Sub Saharan Africa, South Asia and North America, providing an account of the encounter between Southern and Northern journalists against the background of the Cold War’s East/West dynamic. Their operations span the optimistic beginnings of 'Third World'-oriented alternative news into the post-Cold War moment of the 1990s, at a time when the collapse of the Eastern bloc retooled North-South dynamics anew. Our project asks to what extent the news practices of alternative news agencies made their actors and narratives acceptable to mainstream news outlets, thereby leaving their mark on the wider journalistic scene, but at the potential cost of losing their alternative edge. For journalists from the Global South, alternative news agencies seem to have been a gateway into the Northern-dominated media system. The project hypothesises that there were intentions for positive narratives from the Global South to diversify the global news system, but that these expectations gradually gave way to more niche-oriented 'development' style reporting, or even outright PR. The history of emotions provides insights into journalistic narratives that alternative news agencies developed over time, which aimed to make their readers feel close to faraway populations across North/South divides, relying on notions of similarity and equality. Recovering the experiences of Southern correspondents is a key part of the project, and oral history methods are crucial in order to add those to a record that has often relied overwhelmingly on sources from the North. Source materials will include interviews, published material from journalists, their personal archives, news agency archives and correspondence with correspondents, material collected by subscribers, apprehensive governments such as France and the UK, competing news agencies such as Reuters and AFP and supporting organisations such as various West German political foundations and international NGOs. Results will be published in a monograph and two articles.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Frank Bösch