of ideas over profit, or vice versa. In addition, we can find media with the mission of maintaining the established order, and therefore quite concerned with ideology, which would not fit with an emancipatory vision of the use of communication, but instead would be the opposite. Furthermore, Atton (2002) remarks that if the criterion of “creative expression or a combination of both” is included in the third aspect, this broadens the definition of alternative media too much, so that any kind of artistic publication could be included under such a title.

As mentioned earlier, Chris Atton devoted part of his research to the analysis of zines, which are written publications developed as vehicles for personal expression that maintain horizontal communication between publisher and reader, and they have a format that encourages the latter to become authors. According to Duncombe (1997), emulation (turning readers into writers) is fundamental for the world of zine; culture is better when more consumers are able to become producers, or in other words, when readers or spectators become valuable collaborators. The term zine was introduced in the 1980s to designate a wide range of amateur publications, most notably fanzines, which focused primarily on content such as literature, music, film and other cultural activities, although they did not refer only to consumer behaviour (Atton, 2002).

In fact, Fiske (1991) argues that fanzine creators should be considered culture producers, not consumers of culture: at the heart of zine culture is not only the study of some significant other (the celebrity, the cultural object, or the activity), but the study of the self, personal expression, and building communities with common interests.

These fundamental principles that established the creative rationale and the worldwide media distribution of zines are clearly evident in podcasting, which in this way is a medium that retrieves, or remediates, essential elements of the alternative media of the analogue era. Bolter and Grusin (2000) assert that remediation (the introduction of one medium into another, or the transfer of features of an old media into a new media) did not begin with the advent of digital media. The thesis on which the work of these authors is based defends the idea that no current medium, and possibly no future medium, works in the absence of other media, and that the truly novel aspects of the so-called new media are the various shapes in which the old ones are reshaped to respond to new challenges. Using this approach, the new media that have emerged throughout history would mean the evolution, improvement or sophistication of some of the foundations of previous media. From their point of view, the new media must be viewed as structures that go beyond the limits of technology by involving much more than new technical applications at the service of citizens. The new media arise from specific cultural contexts and represent the combination of new uses and protocols in specific situations and areas, such as advertising, education, or personal expression. From this point of view, the concept of the new media would be a troublesome category when defining this novel media and its practices, in such a way that such practices would not exist as such, but would only be an enhancement of the characteristics of previous media. With this approach, the only truly new aspect of the new media is its unrelenting remediation of other forms of mediation. In this regard, what are the remediations that can be found between zines and current podcasts? Which elements of the former are retrieved by podcasting so it can be defined as an alternative medium? Both media, for which its initial steps are separated by almost half a century, are clearly different in technological terms: the zine has an analogue background whereas the podcast has native digital features. They also differ in terms of their production languages: the zine is based on text and static images, while the podcast is based on audio files. The chronological gap between the two media, as