Alt media, as used here, means media produced outside newsroom institutions: funded directly by audiences and distributed through platforms rather than through a publisher or broadcaster.
It is measurable, and it is large
Pew Research Center’s 2024 study of news influencers is the best measurement available. Combining a survey of 10,658 U.S. adults with an analysis of 500 influencers and more than 100,000 posts, it found:
- 21% of U.S. adults regularly get news from news influencers, rising to 37% of adults under 30.
- 77% of those influencers have no affiliation with any news organization.
- 27% were right-leaning, 21% left-leaning, and roughly half had no clear political orientation.
- 85% maintain a presence on X, ahead of Instagram (50%) and YouTube (44%).
The third figure is the one most often misreported. This is not a predominantly partisan category: the largest group of news influencers has no identifiable political lean at all.
Podcasting gives a second reading of the same territory. Pew’s December 2022 survey found about half of U.S. adults had listened to a podcast in the past year, and two-thirds of listeners had heard news discussed in what they listen to.
The long precedent
The framing of this as a digital-era development is wrong, and Hemmer’s history is the correction. Media built explicitly as an alternative to established outlets — magazines, radio networks, book clubs, direct-mail operations — has existed in American politics since the 1940s, built by people who believed the established press would not carry their views. Platform distribution changed the economics of that project; it did not invent it.
The founded field, which read 2004, has been removed for that reason.
What was removed
The previous version asserted a chronology and a set of claims about the ecosystem’s growth and influence. The Pew figures above replace them with measured ones. The recorded connection to GamerGate asserts a relationship that nothing cited here establishes, and its description now says so.
Sources
- 01.
Pew Research Center. America's News Influencers. (2024). Published November 18, 2024. Combines a survey of 10,658 U.S. adults fielded July 15 - August 4, 2024 with analysis of 500 news influencers drawn from 28,266 accounts across five platforms and 104,786 posts. Source for 21% of U.S. adults regularly getting news from news influencers, rising to 37% among under-30s; for 77% of those influencers having no news organization affiliation; for the orientation split of 27% right-leaning, 21% left-leaning and roughly half with no clear orientation; and for the platform distribution, with 85% present on X.
- 02.
Pew Research Center. Podcasts as a Source of News and Information. (2023). Published April 18, 2023; surveyed December 5-11, 2022, n=5,132 U.S. adults. Source for about half of U.S. adults having listened to a podcast in the past year, and for two-thirds of listeners having heard news discussed in what they listen to.
- 03.
Hemmer, N. (2016). Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. University of Pennsylvania Press. History of media built explicitly as an alternative to established outlets, from the 1940s onward — the long precedent for what this page describes as a digital-era phenomenon. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.