Contester l’hégémonie médiatique locale: Entre engagement journalistique et repolitisation des territoires

This article examines the ability of the new players of local news to renew the process of democratic debate in their zone of distribution, in the face of hegemonic regional daily press. We thus hypothesize that local journalism, built in opposition to or alongside dominant players, could catalyze the transformations at work in the journalistic field by championing the introduction of dissenting voices (Benson & Neveu, 2005; Smyrnaios & Thiong-Kay, 2023) in territories characterized until now by the media’s construction of consensus. Based on the "multi-referential" conception of territory put forward by Boure and Lefebvre (2000), we consider it to be structured by the opposition between, on the one hand, the exercise of institutional power and the crystallization of collective social time and, on the other, asymmetrical social relationships and plural or competing enactments of meaning. Ultimately, our aim was to understand the "territorial work" of the media (Noyer & Raoul 2011). Our study focused on 11 media located in the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region, each of which had at least one professional journalist on its editorial staff. Through semi-structured interviews, combined with a focus on the media's meta-discourse, we examined the media's relationship with its territory from three perspectives (market, field and local public space). Our results confirm, among the actors studied, the structuring dynamics of professionalization previously observed in alternative media (Ferron 2006). They also reveal a form of polarization between two journalistic ideal-types, which we characterize in the light of Nielsen's work (2015). Indeed, while some media aim to reduce disparities in access to knowledge of public affairs among citizens (reduction of the "knowledge gap"), others seem above all committed to fostering civic and political engagement among citizens in the local space (reduction of the "engagement gap"). Este artículo se propone examinar la capacidad de los nuevos operadores de la información local para renovar el proceso de alimentación del debate democrático en sus territorios de difusión, frente a una Prensa Diaria Regional hegemónica. De este modo, nuestra hipótesis es que un periodismo local, construido en contra o al lado del actor hegemónico, sería capaz de catalizar las transformaciones en marcha en el campo periodístico, defendiendo la introducción de voces disidentes (Benson y Neveu, 2005; Smyrnaios y Thiong-Kay, 2023) en territorios hasta ahora