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This article investigates the role that community media play in the translocal negotiation of local culture in Latin America. Translocal is a concept that captures the way that local cultural producers engage with national and transnational forces in shaping everyday cultural practices. This study focuses on community radio station Ecos de Manantlán in Zapotitlán de Vadillo, Mexico (Radio Zapotitlán), during the years 2006–2012. Radio Zapotitlán is officially categorized as a campesino or agricultural laborer/peasant station and presents its campesino identity through radio and Internet content. Analyses of that content, along with interviews with station associates and listeners, reveal the complex cultural mediations between local media producers, national regulators, and transnational donors. This study investigates the local production of a transnationally funded radionovela, or radio soap opera, as a window onto the station’s role as a cultural mediator. This article argues that station participants used the radionovela to express local values and meanings and to marginalize the educational goals of the transnational agency funding the project. Radio Zapotitlán offers a concrete case of cultural negotiation in which local interests engage with – and transform – donor-funded content aimed at the local community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary examines the intersections of mobility and locality in community-based media practices. In order to investigate how media-oriented practices intertwine with understandings of community, the article sets out a brief history of a community arts organization, Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE), which began as a mobile information service based in Western Sydney, Australia. I examine projects conducted by the organization over the last 25 years to tease out wider shifts from ‘information distribution’ towards ‘community cultural development’. Drawing on interviews with former and current workers at the organization, the article explores how the organization has transformed within the different scales and speeds of communication networks afforded in digital media. The article explores four key themes in order to track these broader changes through shifts away from physical transportation towards virtual communication, from face-to-face community organizing towards digital and networked media systems: ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ was/is the organization, and ‘how’ did/does it meet and respond to changing technologies? While questions of scale (the ‘where’ axis) and technologies (the ‘how’) persist and have become increasingly complex, the organization’s purpose (the ‘what’), the communities that the organization speaks with and listens to (the ‘who’) seem to have changed rather less. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Media research has generally focused more attention on analysing the 'problems' of media racism than on exploring possibilities for 'solutions' or change. In this article I introduce community media interventions as an under-developed and highly productive field of research into both the possibilities and the limitations of working for media change in the context of the 'war on terror' and the 'globalisation of the Muslim Other'. The opening sections discuss the concept of 'community media interventions' and provide an overview of media intervention strategies among racialized communities in Sydney, Australia since 11 September 2001. The concluding sections sketch the many limitations and dilemmas for media interventions as strategies for responding to racialized media. I argue that, in order to adequately understand and contribute to struggles for media change, media research needs to attend to the politics of 'listening' in addition to the dynamics of 'speaking up'. Crucially, attention to listening shifts the focus and responsibility for change from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and privileges that shape who and what can be heard in media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]