Understanding Peripheral Journalism from the Boundary: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract With increasing digitization and commercialization, a plethora of new formats has entered the journalistic field, challenging its norms, routines, and practices. Research on these so-called peripheral actors, particularly in political journalism, has grown substantially, leading to a range of studies that engage with key concepts of the core and periphery. However, because such descriptions often assume a homogeneity that fails to account for the diversity of peripheral actors, we still have an incomplete and, crucially, under-theorized understanding of the different kinds of constellations in which peripheral journalism may exist. This article intends to address this gap by offering a new and comprehensive theoretical framework, which draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, as well as doxa to understand peripheral political journalism. We then test this framework in the context of the Austrian journalistic field and identify 11 different forms of peripheral political journalistic actors.


Introduction
Recent years have seen journalism scholarship increasingly take account of the surge of new journalistic formats that seem to operate on the periphery of the field-actors and formats that may look like journalism in some ways, but also very different in other ways. This is often considered to be a particular result of increased digitization and commercialization, which has seen citizens, (h)activists, and influencers engage in "acts of journalism" ( € Ornebring et al. 2018, p. 418). Yet, such developments can also be seen as merely the latest in a long history of differentiation of the journalistic field, which, among other things, led to the emergence of new professional norms such as commercial and political independence (Hallin 2005). While the so-called core of journalism developed in one direction, there has always existed a periphery, with changing constellations in a dynamic process. Formats which used to be at the coresuch as the party-owned press that existed in much of Europe until the mid-20th century-were pushed to the periphery, but nowadays seem to reappear in new forms online (Hallin and Mancini 2004;Heft et al. 2020).
There now exists a plethora of different formats that at least seem like journalism and which to varying degrees lay claim to being part of the journalistic field, shaping its norms, routines, and practices. Peripheral news media and journalists have long been studied through the prism of alternative media, which were contrasted to legacy or mainstream media (Atton and Hamilton 2008). Similarly, research on the more recent phenomena spurred by digital technology and social media platforms has heavily relied on conceptualizations of the boundaries of the field and how they are contested (Carlson and Lewis 2015). Both approaches understand peripheral actors as opposite, creating a binary between the journalistic core and the journalistic periphery, even though neither are homogeneous (Deuze and Witschge 2018;Eldridge 2019;Cheruiyot et al. 2021).
Despite the growth of scholarship, there are three key shortcomings: First, the conceptual metaphor between core and periphery, while valid and a useful heuristic to some extent, may prevent critical nuance. Second, viewing peripheral actors as singular cases, as is often done, limits a fuller understanding of their influence on the journalistic field-perhaps part of the reason why scholars use a large variety of terms that refer to similar phenomena, well-illustrated by Loosen et al. (2022, p. 11). Third, many studies investigating the boundaries of journalism focus more on discursive claims of membership, perceptions of belonging, and practices, but less on other dimensions which shape the relative power that peripheral projects can have, like economic or political capital.
We address these gaps by offering a theoretical model to better understand the complexity of highly different "new" actors in the field. Drawing on Bourdieusian thought, particularly the concepts of hetero-and orthodoxy, autonomy and heteronomy, we offer more nuance in capturing the heterogeneity of the field as we can study these peripheral actors in relation to each other as well as the "core" of journalism. As such, our theoretical model helps us to (a) identify and differentiate between various forms of peripheral journalism, and (b) to compare across these different degrees and constellations of peripherality in relation to each other and the core of the field. This leads to a more complex and dynamic view of peripheral journalism, enabling us to better understand the power relations across the journalistic field as a whole. We put this framework to the test by way of a pilot study that focuses on political peripheral journalistic actors, which challenge or attack the democratic function of journalism to varying degrees (Nygaard 2021). Despite this focus, for the purpose of illustration, we argue that our model can and should be applied to all forms of journalism.

The Journalistic Field: Periphery and Core
As more and more scholars have come to assert, journalism is not monolithic and exists in a range of forms (Deuze and Witschge 2018;€ Ornebring et al. 2018). Understood from a field-theoretical perspective (Bourdieu 1996(Bourdieu , 1998), journalism constitutes a social space in which journalists, news organizations, and other actors engaging in journalism are stratified depending on different material and symbolic resources. As a result, these actors can occupy different positions within a field, according to their professional knowledge and skills, social recognition, and economic power. Recent research has perceived the field's heterogeneity through the concepts of boundaries, core and periphery (Carlson and Lewis 2015;Eldridge 2018).
Studying the field's boundaries offers insight into how different journalists, actors from other social fields, and society at large perceive ongoing transformation processes by defining what is and what is not journalism (Singer 2015). Journalists and new entrants engage in boundary-work by verbalizing "claims to authority or resources" (Gieryn 1983, p. 781) which can be discursively granted or denied by established actors in the journalistic field through the strategies of expulsion, expansion and protection (Gieryn 1999). Compared to other social fields, the boundaries of the journalistic field are more permeable because degrees or certified knowledge are not a prerequisite for entry (Lewis 2015).
On the other hand, journalists enjoy benefits such as access to information via press passes and broader legal protection for publishing leaked material. This is why new entrants discursively demand to be treated as equals when they offer functionally equivalent content (Eldridge 2018). These new entrants are also often conceptualized as peripheral actors, entering from the boundaries of the field. Depending on their deviance to journalistic norms, their claims to authority can either be met with rejection or acceptance from the journalistic field. As such, journalistic boundary-work can include: the incorporation or normalization of non-traditional journalists, practices or new media (expansion of the field); the dismissal of deviant actors, practices and forms or values (expulsion from the field); and lastly, the protection of any attack on the field's autonomy (Carlson 2015).
Several studies have explored these boundaries by focusing on specific new actors, such as citizen journalists, (micro)bloggers, (h)activists, programmers, or entrepreneurial journalists (Baack 2018;Carlson and Lewis 2015;Maares and Hanusch 2020). Peripherality in journalism is often conflated with digital novelties despite some of them resembling long-standing journalistic actors and formats (Cheruiyot et al. 2021). Historically, insurgents or challengers to the journalistic field have been studied through the lens of alternative journalism, a highly ambiguous term that positions community radios, fanzines, and commercially successful media like the Rolling Stones Magazine as different from mainstream media (Rauch 2016). Conceptual distinctions between mainstream and alternatives, incumbents and insurgents (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, chapter four;Bourdieu 1996, pp. 231-234) also create a division between the field's core and periphery. As Eldridge (2019) argues, the metaphor of core and periphery allows us to study change in more detail, as peripheral actors might position themselves explicitly against some features of the core, for example, through publishing streams and routines. However, it also suggests that the journalistic field is "an established space with clear dimensions" (Eldridge 2019, p. 10) and a homogeneous core, something that is arguably not the case (Deuze and Witschge 2018).
Both core and periphery can be considered as encompassing highly heterogeneous groups with different degrees of professionalism, different motivations, and practices (Harcup 2005). For example, research has shown that in many cases, participatory, alternative or community journalism is not produced by laypeople but, in fact, by (semi-)professionals who have had some degree of journalistic socialization and training (Ahva 2017;Carpenter, Nah, and Chung 2015;Kus et al. 2017;Tshabangu 2021). Moreover, even within these peripheral realms of the journalistic field, a distinction is discursively drawn. This is especially palpable when online journalists demarcate themselves from bloggers, even when they work with limited resources and host their own website (Ferrucci and Vos 2017;Ryfe 2019). Similarly, some (micro-)bloggers do not perceive their work as journalism despite offering something similar (Maares and Hanusch 2020;Ryfe 2019). Such otherness can also contribute to their self-perception and unique selling point to audiences, as alternative or peripheral actors portray themselves as radically autonomous or embrace the perspective of an "ordinary citizen" (Schwarzenegger 2021).
Thus, if we collapse all the different formats of peripheral actors into one group opposite an assumed core, we risk losing critical nuance. At the same time, viewing these actors as singular cases prevents us from fully understanding their influence on the journalistic field and its core function for society. Recent theorizations have attempted to bring some order to the chaos by differentiating peripheral actors into groups, such as explicit interlopers, implicit interlopers and intralopers (Eldridge 2018;Holton and Belair-Gagnon 2018) or antagonists and agonists (Eldridge 2019). These categories work in relation to the journalistic core, but what distinguishes them is the extent to which they threaten journalism's unique function. For example, while implicit interlopers and intralopers are somewhat embedded or associated with core journalistic outlets or routines, explicit interlopers challenge journalistic authority more overtly and sometimes aggressively. However, their motivations to do so can differ vastly from wanting to transform the field or re-energize its "original" ideals of critical reporting and public service, to pursuing political or financial objectives (Usher 2017;Vos, Craft, and Ashley 2012;Wagemans, Witschge, and Deuze 2016). Depending on these motives, they can further be considered as agonists who offer "constructive disagreement" or antagonists, destructive outsiders who "use the guise of journalism to disguise more antagonistic ambitions, serving political agendas rather than public ones" (Eldridge 2019, p. 15).
While such distinctions observe the struggle at the field's boundaries and the relationship between periphery and core, we argue that they ignore other dimensions which shape the relative power that peripheral projects can have. While discursive claims of membership and motivations behind them are indeed essential categories of differentiation, it would appear that organizational and economic structures from which these take place are also important. Thus, we turn to research on alternative media which provides useful categories to understand peripheral actors on the micro-, meso-and macro-level (Holt, Ustad Figenschou, and Frischlich 2019).

Peripheral Political Actors in the Journalistic Field
Peripheral political journalism has long been understood through the lens of alternative journalism, a term with great definitional vagueness as it is always in opposition to the dominant and legitimated forms of journalism, the so-called "mainstream" media (Atton and Hamilton 2008). Alternative journalism can thus be different in epistemology (e.g., radically subjective reporting), in practices (e.g., more compassionate sourcing), in organization (e.g., anti-hierarchical), or in publishing (Atton and Hamilton 2008;Harcup 2005). At the same time, studies indicate that self-identified alternative journalists adhere to professional standards like citing diverse sources. For example, in what he terms "oppositional reporting," Harcup (2014) categorizes the practice to cite multiple sources both from elite and marginalized groups while at the same time taking the perspective of the dominated within a news story.
Therefore, alternative political journalism has often been linked to emancipating, radical, critical, autonomous, activist, and participatory media (Fuchs 2010;Rauch 2016). Such media aim to provide a counter-public, filling in the gaps left by mainstream media, addressing oft-ignored issues and perspectives, and giving marginalized groups a voice (Harcup 2005). Thus, what most conceptualizations have in common is that alternative journalism is "closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of "objectivity" with overt advocacy and oppositional practices" (Atton and Hamilton 2008, p. 135). This is further emphasized by studies that conceptualize consuming alternative journalism as civic engagement (Harcup 2016). Similarly, audiences believe alternative media should foremost be "devoted to issues and events not discussed elsewhere, allow a wide range of people to express their voices and opinions, use new and interactive technologies, encourage people to get involved in civic life, advocate for a different system of societal values, pursue social justice, and criticize and analyze the work done by mainstream media" (Rauch 2016, p. 765 orig. emphasis).
While scholarship has traditionally associated alternative forms of journalism with the progressive left and applauded its potential for civic engagement (Atton and Hamilton 2008), more recently, research indicates that anti-system, populist, and rightwing peripheral actors are increasing in numbers (Heft et al. 2021;Mayerh€ offer 2021;Mukhudwana 2021). As "self-perceived corrective" (Holt, Ustad Figenschou, and Frischlich 2019, p. 862), such actors are more and more vocal in their media criticism, taking an antagonistic approach in their positioning vis-� a-vis the core of the journalistic field, which they portray as "politically correct, left-wing media," "lying media," or "dinosaur media" (Figenschou and Ihlebaek 2019). Moreover, as such populist peripheral actors tend to publish misinformation, scholars have questioned whether they should be considered alternative at all and instead be regarded as mimicry of both legacy and alternative media (Robertson and Mourão 2020). Recent research thus proposes a relational approach to understand such peripheral actors along the micro-(producers and content), meso-(organizational structure, epistemology, publishing routines, and funding) and macro-level (systems-level ideology) (Holt, Ustad Figenschou, and Frischlich 2019;Mayerh€ offer 2021). While most of these categories have been employed to study right-wing, populist peripheral actors, they are actually helpful to understanding peripheral political journalistic actors in general.
On the micro-level, we find producers who can be distinguished as professionally trained or socialized journalists and activist or citizen journalists. Research shows that individual actors fluctuate between legacy and alternative media and experienced journalists turn to alternative forms either because they were let go (Aslan Ozgul and Veneti 2021) or were frustrated with the state of journalism (Harcup 2005). Moreover, another distinction on the micro-level refers to the content of peripheral projects and whether it focuses on topics marginalized or ignored by other media (Mayerh€ offer 2021). This level also includes the incorporation of "new news genre(s)," particularly ones that merge factual reporting and opinion (Holt, Ustad Figenschou, and Frischlich 2019, p. 863) and whether the content exhibits sensationalism, bias, or misinformation (Robertson and Mourão 2020).
On the meso-level, the organizational structure outlines the extent to which the content is shaped by a shared epistemology and the editorial freedom producers have. Peripheral media can comprise blogs from individuals, grass-root, anti-hierarchical group projects, and media following established newsroom structures. It also includes whether peripheral media rely on unpaid work (Holt, Ustad Figenschou, and Frischlich 2019). Much of the organizational structure is shaped by the outlet's underlying ideology and funding (Aslan Ozgul and Veneti 2021). Moreover, as organizational structures shape the norms and routines within the outlet, different news values can be prioritized, and sourcing and verification practices exercised differently (Buyens and Van Aelst 2022;Harcup 2005;Holt, Ustad Figenschou, and Frischlich 2019). Similarly, peripheral actors have introduced new and different publishing routines to the journalistic field as they embrace new technology more quickly (Atton and Hamilton 2008). But peripheral media also mimic established media, especially in their visual appearance and structuring (Mayerh€ offer 2021).
While many peripheral media operate at a different scope from legacy media, all projects rely on financial resources or unpaid time-labour. This shapes professionalism and the organization of everyday practice, like having daily editorial meetings and two-step editorial processes (Aslan Ozgul and Veneti 2021). Apart from entrepreneurial projects, little attention is given to the business models of peripheral media (Holt, Ustad Figenschou, and Frischlich 2019). However, knowing how such projects are funded is important to understanding their motives, especially considering that party outlets are (re)emerging. Thus, how peripheral actors are funded speaks to their autonomy from external (political and economic) influences and can also be perceived as authentic and anti-establishment by audiences. For example, Danish right-wing news media rely primarily on uncommon forms of funding, namely donations. Nevertheless, Heft et al. (2020) have studied right-wing news media's reliance on advertising by calculating the dependency in relation to other forms of funding and found only a small minority wholly independent of advertising.
The meso-level also includes how peripheral media position themselves vis-� a-vis legacy or mainstream media and what kind of relationship they aim to build with their audience. For example, Robertson and Mourão (2020) found that alternative news sites explicitly state their biases and commitment to activism in their About pages, positioning themselves as "genuine" and more truthful opposition to the journalistic core, which claims to provide impartial journalism. Similarly, peripheral actors assume different positions of authority depending on their political ideology. More moderate alternative news sites tend to employ insider and expert positions, for example, by referring to their knowledge and experience in journalism or the topic of the articles. In contrast, more radical news sites take citizen or victim perspectives when engaging in media criticism (Figenschou and Ihlebaek 2019). Moreover, peripheral actors also invoke a particular audience by hinting at specific ideological themes (Robertson and Mourão 2020). Consequently, these peripheral actors embrace a completely different epistemological approach to news as traditional journalistic values are rejected in favour of ideology.
Lastly, on the macro-level, the specific media system (Hallin and Mancini 2004) shapes what can and cannot be considered peripheral, deviant, and alternative (Shoemaker and Reese 2014). Counterhegemony thus reacts to the power distribution in the social space but also within the journalistic field. For example, in a more commercialized media system that cherishes impartiality, alternative news media aim to provide more interpretive content, while in a more politically polarized system, it is the opposite (Aslan Ozgul and Veneti 2021). Moreover, Holt, Ustad Figenschou, and Frischlich (2019, p. 864) argue peripheral media can be considered small eco-systems with "system-preserving tendencies." While considering only the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels may not capture the struggle over what journalism is and should be, or which practices are perceived acceptable or deviant, the categories listed here are nevertheless useful to investigate different peripheral actors. By further linking them to Bourdieusian thought, we can understand this struggle within the field, as well as the relative dominance of different actors and even different eco-systems. For example, feminist media or alt-right alternative media could be considered subfields within or at the periphery of the journalistic field following a different vision (nomos) of what journalism should be.

Thinking Relationally: Nomos, Heteronomy, and Doxa
From a field-theoretical perspective, social spaces like the journalistic field are organized by a shared understanding of the field's societal function, boundaries, and tacit rules, and by a stratification of agents in the field along several dimensions. In particular, the concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, nomos, and doxa allow us to investigate change in the journalistic fields and map actors according to their relative power to challenge or preserve the field (Bourdieu 1996).
Members of social fields compete over meaning and recognition and therefore also over positions within the field as these determine the legitimacy of agents and the power they will have in shaping what is deemed valuable and meaningful. This struggle is often conceptualized through two dimensions with two opposite poles each, which can also be described as (1) new versus old and (2) autonomy versus heteronomy (Bourdieu 1996). The first opposition includes both new entrants against established members, as well as new ideas, norms, and values against old ones. The second opposition defines the degree to which a field is reliant on external influences (e.g., political or economic logics), but also distinguishes members of the field according to their orientation to external values and norms (Benson and Neveu 2005). Here, journalistic fields as mediators between other social fields are often more heteronomous, i.e., more oriented towards political or commercial interests (Maares and Hanusch 2022;Schudson 2005). While the autonomous pole consists "of actors who are most dedicated to the values, skills and resources which allowed the field to become a social space different from other fields" (Neveu 2007, p. 337), the heteronomous pole hosts actors who are more oriented towards economic gain or political conviction.
Regardless, most members of a field share a basic mutual understanding (referred to as nomos) of (1) what makes the field unique for society and (2) who can belong to the field according to this understanding (Bourdieu 1996). In journalism research, the first dimension of nomos has been linked to journalistic ideology, journalism's professional culture and cognitive role conceptions as they grasp the variance of nomos (Deuze 2005;Eldridge 2018;Hanitzsch 2011). The second dimension of nomos relates to narrative constructions of belonging and (self-)identification. Nomos is thus the prerequisite for another concept that stabilizes the field and its boundaries: doxa. As a theory that focuses on social relations, field theory assumes that members of a given field share certain dispositions. This also means that they know how to behave, have certain beliefs about what is "true," and do not question specific circumstances that structure the field. Bourdieu (1977, p. 164) terms these beliefs about the "taken for granted" doxa. Consequently, doxa is a naturalization of the field as it provides members with a specific set of implicit and commonly shared criteria for belonging (Eldridge 2018), contributes to the field's hierarchical division, and eventually ensures its internal homogeneity (Thomson 2014). As such, both nomos and doxa define the struggle within the field, as some institutional roles and epistemologies can be perceived as more legitimate than others (Hanitzsch 2007).
All social fields have their distinct nomos or logic under which they operate. When actors from external fields enter the journalistic field, they bring other resources and ideas, possibly adding to the transformation of the journalistic field, its power relations, and nomos. As a comparatively heteronomous field that is generally more susceptible to external influences, its barriers are relatively low for "any actor to express belonging" (Eldridge 2018, p. 168). Moreover, peripheral or marginalized actors can challenge or reproduce the shared beliefs and thus also radically affect the understanding or narratives of what the field is about (Bourdieu 1996). Thus, who is and who is not part of the field is often an important site of struggle (Bourdieu 1993). Importantly, field membership does not rely on our normative understanding of journalism but rather on whether an actor creates field effects. By rejecting new entrants, members of the field recognize them to some extent, thereby "indicating that the rejected are indeed implicated in the field, even if in a dominated or transient position" (Atkinson 2020, p. 86). Moreover, because of such a struggle over membership, dominated or transient actors can have effects on what is perceived important in the field. For example, we could understand the increasing recollection of fact-checking practices as an effect of deviant peripheral actors spreading mis-information.
Applying Bourdieusian thought to new (political) entrants to the field, we can understand them in relation to one another and to the established "core" of the field. To comprehend their possible impact on the field's nomos, we must investigate them through (1) their position-taking, (2) the heterodoxy of their claims and (3) their dependence on heteronomous values.
1. To participate in the field, agents must at least claim membership and take position. However, even actors who deliberately do not perceive themselves as journalistic can have effects on the field's nomos when its underlying values are shifting (Craft, Vos, and David Wolfgang 2016). Thus, to understand peripheral actors, we first have to assess whether or not they claim membership. Here, we can also assess how agents position themselves vis-� a-vis established journalistic actors, and whether they employ an agonistic, antagonistic, or indifferent voice (Eldridge 2019). In other words, whether they aim to critique journalistic doxa and other journalists in a constructive manner or whether their goal is to occupy the position of a destructive opponent. 2. All actors in the journalistic field can be understood through their accumulated capital and the forms of capital they are invested in, which also indicates their relative autonomy or heteronomy, i.e., their dependence on external influences. While most research into journalistic heteronomy focuses on the amount of economic capital and thus susceptibility to the doxa of the economic field (i.e., mass production and mass audience), we argue it is also necessary to explicitly consider organizations' and actors' political capital and their relationship to the political field (Neveu 2007). Both forms of capital can be weighed against journalistic capital (valued knowledge, training, and skills) separately to understand actors' position on the spectrum of heteronomy and autonomy. The overall accumulation of different forms of capital can also indicate whether peripheral actors are, in fact, as peripheral as we think, occupying marginalized areas of the field or whether they are located in more dominant parts of the field, giving them more power to shape the field's nomos and doxa (Atkinson 2020). 3. Moreover, the membership of peripheral, alternative, or new entrants is only disputed when they rupture the underlying shared beliefs about the field. Here, we can again draw on the concept of doxa, which is the "pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge shaped by experience, to unconscious inherited physical and relational predispositions" (Deer 2014, p. 115). While doxa itself is naturalized and thus unconscious, the arbitrariness of this intuitive belief about the field can become visible when the dominant beliefs (orthodoxy) are confronted with an alternative (heterodoxy). For example, while some news values or professional norms are undisputed, others have been open to debate and change, like the shift from objectivity to transparency (Schultz 2007;Vos and Craft 2017).
We can thus link doxa to much of the categories employed in alternative media research like epistemologies, journalistic professional norms and routines, and even distribution channels. In journalism scholarship, doxa has been described as "overly idealized narratives" (Eldridge 2018, p. 42) and can be conceptualized as ideal-typical role perceptions (Hanitzsch and Vos 2018). It also includes to what extent actors embrace a journalistic or corollary identity (Eldridge 2018, p. 127), i.e., whether they proclaim themselves to be journalists outright or allude to their identity by criticizing journalism for failing to act according to the field's nomos. In line with this, doxa also comprises other dimensions of journalism culture, namely epistemologies and ethical views (Hanitzsch 2007).
Moreover, doxic beliefs emerge in core values of journalistic practice, like determining newsworthiness (Schultz 2007), the ideal of objectivity ( € Ornebring et al. 2018), or the separation of "church and state" (Coddington 2015), but also the professional norm to split occupational roles and fact-check before publication (Brandst€ atter 2016). Such a differentiation of labor has implications for the organization of journalism, as it is generally assumed that journalistic outlets must be run by a collective or newsroom. Doxic beliefs can also pertain to distribution channels and format, as new approaches can be normalized as legitimate story-telling formats or rejected as not complying with the field's core beliefs (Tandoc and Jenkins 2017). While orthodoxy can be easily found through markers like public interest, objectivity, autonomy, and social responsibility (Eldridge 2018; Hovden 2012), heterodox, or even heretic, beliefs can be found both in radically new formats and antagonistic claims.
We thus propose a model (Figure 1) which understands both established and new actors stratified across two dimensions: (a) the extent to which they are autonomous from external influences and (b) whether they exhibit orthodoxy or heterodoxy either in their role perceptions, norms and values, or practices. While we focus on political journalism in the broadest sense in the following sections, the concepts of heteronomy/autonomy and heterodoxy/orthodoxy can be applied to any form of journalism. This includes sub-fields or beats like fashion journalism, local journalism, or sports journalism, but also more comprehensive analyses of a journalistic field at large, which would compare all formats in relation to each other.
This opens a space of varying degrees of autonomy and orthodoxy in which actors can be mapped in relation to other members of the field and its dominant discourses. Thus, in the upper left part of Figure 1, we would locate journalists or outlets that adhere to the core principles of a specific journalistic field, have high field-specific cultural capital (i.e., journalistic knowledge and skills), and are comparatively autonomous from and disinterested in economic or political capital. On the other hand, a blogging politician who radically criticizes how journalism is done and who claims to offer better information or a counter-public would be located at the lower right side, maybe even occupying the boundaries or twilight zone of the journalistic field. We include this twilight zone to account for the permeable boundaries of the journalistic field and the actors who do not claim membership to it but nonetheless have effects on it. Within this zone, actors can also occupy more autonomous or heteronomous and more heterodox or orthodox positions. Approaching different peripheral actors and the journalistic field at large through the prism of field theory thus integrates categories employed in alternative media research and allows us to also include, on an individual level, how doxa, field membership and accumulated capital shape journalists' practical behavior (through another Bourdieusian concept, habitus).

Identifying Types of Peripheral Political Journalism
To put our conceptual framework to the test and illustrate its dimensions and the most plausible co-occurrences, we draw on an explorative data set of the self-descriptions of 57 peripheral political journalism projects in Austria. This allows us to compare various peripheral journalistic actors through discursive claims intended towards the journalistic field as well as the audience of said field. Austria offers an interesting case for three reasons: (1) it is a comparatively small democracy with a relatively close-knit journalistic field, (2) counter-hegemonic and misinformative blogging has a long tradition (Heft et al. 2021), and (3) party press projects re-emerged in the past five years, with each larger Austrian party funding at least one political journalism project. Cases for this study were selected through three sources: (1) media coverage of projects, (2) journalistic discourse on social media platforms (de-)legitimizing such projects, and (3) two lists of political new media (Blogheim.at; Free media, 2019). While we may have missed some projects, it is also consistent with our theoretical approach as we included only projects with some weight in the field, as they were acknowledged to some degree by other members of the field, even if these members themselves occupied marginal positions.
We screen-grabbed and saved each site's "About" pages, imprints, and specific sections covering their mission (if applicable) and analyzed them for their discursive position-taking and markers of hetero-or orthodox claims. This included, for example, whether they favored more interventionist or activist approaches to journalism, which is in opposition to the dominant doxa of journalism's role in Austria (Hanitzsch, Seethaler, and Wyss 2019). We assess whether their discursive position-taking is agonistic, antagonistic, or indifferent to the core of journalism (Eldridge 2019), but also how they positioned themselves in relation to other social actors. Moreover, we generally examined to what extent platforms appeared to adhere to norms like the separation of occupational roles; whether they claimed field-specific cultural capital and thus journalism training or referred to field-external expertise; which distribution channels they used; whether they appeared to be reliant on advertising and how transparent they were about their political affiliations-if they had any. We should stress that because of the exploratory nature of this study, the assessment of these aspects was predominantly qualitative. Moreover, our reliance on self-descriptions has obvious shortcomings, as we could not measure the sites' actual impact on the field. Hence, the following exploration shall serve more as an illustration of the model and the concepts of position-taking, autonomy/heteronomy, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy. Further studies employing different methodologies will be necessary to gain a more comprehensive understanding of these issues.
Our approach shows the diversity of peripheral political actors who occupy both the dominated part of the journalistic field-due to lack of symbolic recognition-and the twilight zone at the edges of the field's boundaries (Maares and Hanusch 2020). In fact, a large group of our sample does not describe themselves as journalists but instead uses discursive markers like "bloggers" or "private webpages" (see Table 1). Table 1 summarizes the different types of peripheral political journalistic actors we identified in the specific Austrian case. It shows the different positions these actors occupy vis-� a-vis the established core, their gradual autonomy and the specific heterodox claims that can be deduced from their self-descriptions. We discuss each of these in more detail in the following, ordering them primarily along levels of autonomy not to infer any hierarchy but purely for the purpose of structuring information.

Orthodoxy
Among projects which claim high levels of autonomy and orthodoxy, we were able to identify the following three groups: Legitimate journalists comprise journalists who regularly publish in large, established media or who work for public broadcasters. All of them have high symbolic capital and are known for their work as journalists. Accordingly, they do not voice dissent with the journalistic field and are commercially autonomous or funded through crowdfunding or subscriptions. They are also not affiliated with political parties and organizations, even though some make no secret of their conservative or progressive beliefs. The re-invigorators believe that journalism is focused too much on partisanship and profit maximation. Instead, they emphasize the importance of "journalism that takes a stance" ("Journalismus mit Haltung"). They want to re-invigorate what they believe is journalism's nomos, namely providing information autonomous from commercial and political interests and dedicated to their citizen audience (Die Substanz). But they also acknowledge that every journalist has certain convictions for human rights and democratic beliefs and should act accordingly. Thus, they claim membership in the field and often support this claim with their experience working for news media. In their assessment of news media, they are agonistic. For example, they argue that news media in general are too closely connected to politicians and that they try to cover this with "pseudo-objectivity" (Tatsachen). They claim to be commercially and politically autonomous and primarily financed through crowdfunding, occasionally mixed with advertising.
The expert bloggers are individual actors interested in politics who have no political affiliation and do not perceive themselves as part of the journalistic field. Their position-taking does not voice any opposition to Austrian media but instead emphasizes that their websites offer private blogs, analysis of, and opinion on current affairs. Among them are political scientists, as well as a farmer-turned-investigative reporter (Die TIWAG).

Moderate Heterodoxy
The intralopers resemble the quasi-peripheral new actors who are somehow embedded in core journalism described by Holton and Belair-Gagnon (2018). 1 This set of actors claims membership through lexical markers like "online medium" (Fakt ist Fakt), "digital journalism" (Hashtag), or "newsroom" (Chefredaktion) and they have no apparent political affiliations. Their position vis-� a-vis other media is mostly indifferent, maybe slightly agonistic, when they criticize the lack of funding and diverse newsrooms in legacy media. Most projects in this category are financed through crowd-or public funding, and none carry advertising on their distribution platforms. However, some projects have affiliations to existing news media and could be interpreted as playgrounds for innovative ideas. These actors aim to provide political journalism most closely aligned with the field's nomos but they employ a new approach, like focusing on fact-checking, participatory reporting, or data journalism. Often, they also choose more unconventional distribution channels to reach their audiences. For example, the project Die Chefredaktion (the newsroom) is solely streamed and posted on Instagram. Actors in this group also tend to have journalistic training, adhere to the occupational norm of separate occupational roles, are therefore not projects run by one person, and generally do not voice heterodox ideas on what journalism should be. Some of these actors do not claim membership and instead refer to themselves as "blog" or "platform." However, they have been perceived as important by others. One example is the recently terminated project Neuwal, which offered data journalistic analyses of political elections and had previously worked with legacy media to engage citizens with political information.

Heterodoxy
Among the actors who exhibit only moderate autonomy, we could only identify one group with heterodox claims. The advocates (see Hanitzsch and Vos 2018, p. 155) claim membership directly through the marker of "journalist" and by positioning themselves vis-� a-vis the "commercial media," "media landscape" (Ausreisser), or the "corporate media" (Unsere Zeitung). They are more agonistic in their position-taking than the intralopers and often claim that they or their newsrooms have training and experience in the journalistic field. Some outlets could also be considered a form of training for aspiring journalists (Biber and Unsere Zeitung). At the same time, some actors also left traditional newsrooms and chose the periphery because they felt there was no "(adequate) place for me in so-called mainstream journalism" (Darf sie das?). These actors do not necessarily question the journalistic doxa aggressively but aim to provide a space for those they believe are not represented in the public space, like feminist or multi-ethnic perspectives. However, they emphasize long-standing journalistic norms like focusing on "immediate, objective, balanced and diverse reporting, following strict journalistic criteria of quality and with due diligence" (Unsere Zeitung). These actors can generally be described as possessing moderate commercial and political autonomy. The cases in our sample are either financed through crowdfunding and subscriptions, but in some cases, they also depend on advertising revenue or public funding, and none have political affiliations. However, they also clearly embrace a more political or activist understanding of their role as journalists. Their criticism for the lack of these perspectives in other media outlets also encompasses an adversarial position towards power when news media are perceived as only catering to those in power.

Orthodoxy
We find two sets of actors who are located at the heteronomous pole yet are orthodox in their views: The party collaborators 2 refers to the renaissance of the party press which has a long tradition in the Austrian journalistic field but had disappeared over recent decades (Hallin and Mancini 2004;Schwarz 1959). Actors claim membership in the field by referring to themselves as "newspaper" (Volksblatt) and "weekly" (Zur Zeit). In their position-taking, they are indifferent vis-� a-vis other media because they do not perceive their primary goal to correct journalism. Moreover, they are highly heteronomous as they are all funded and founded by political parties or organizations affiliated with political parties. However, in comparison to the political advocates and political watchdogs, discussed later, this group of peripheral news media does not voice heterodox role perceptions, apart from maybe being slightly more conservative (Volksblatt), more progressive and emancipatory (Kontrast), or right-leaning (Tagesstimme). Accordingly, they aim to offer content aligned with their political organization.
Activists and political bloggers consist of individuals with apparent affiliations to political parties or organizations who do not claim membership in the field. Generally, they also do not position themselves vis-� a-vis journalistic media in their "About" pages 3 . These actors aim to blog and write about politics with their expert knowledge as political actors. At the same time, they make it evident that their web page is a "private blog" (Protestblog). It is also apparent that most of these platforms have no commercial interests; a few run on crowdfunding or cross-financing by advertising their other work like books.

Heterodoxy
Lastly, we identified four slightly different sets of actors who are located at the heteronomous pole and who voice heterodox claims: The political advocates are similar to the advocates but are clearly affiliated with political parties or political organizations. They claim membership in the field, again through lexical markers and by positioning themselves vis-� a-vis other media, which in their view fail to offer a voice to the marginalized. They embrace feminist and antiracist advocacy and want to discuss poverty and other social issues in more depth. What distinguishes these actors from the advocates is their vocal affiliation with political parties and organizations. They are still relatively autonomous commercially, as they are financed through crowdfunding.
The political watchdogs include party-affiliated platforms which aim to provide "ruthless, investigative reporting" (Fass ohne Boden). They position themselves in the journalistic field as news media and criticize other media for being too ideologic, conservative, or complacent with those in power. As they are affiliated with political parties across the spectrum, their investigations are also aligned with the views of their political organizations.
Imposters include what others have described as right-wing digital outlets (Heft et al. 2020). They claim membership in the field and embrace a counterhegemonic role as journalists. The position-taking vis-� a-vis the media is antagonistic, they refer to them as "left media" and "lying journalists" (Wochenblick) and paint themselves as victims of censorship and slander campaigns of this media system. Moreover, they break with journalistic norms of balance by approving polarization as they are not interested in "supporting consensus but instead aim to fuel disagreement" (Info-direkt). Following Eldridge's (2018, p. 166) assessment, these actors are malappropriating the journalistic identity to mask a hidden agenda, such as introducing a right-wing doxa into the public and thus social space (Heft et al. 2021;Richards 2019).
Populist antagonistic outsiders position themselves outside the journalistic field by emphasizing their identity as blogs or forums. However, they voice antagonistic views against news media and the "mainstream" of debate. Moreover, these outlets are affiliated with political parties or organizations, among them primarily members of the right-wing populist freedom party FP € O. They voice heterodoxy and claim to offer analysis of topics that are not covered in "politically correct, left-leaning media" (Andreas M€ olzer).
We can now map these different groups of actors onto our theoretical framework discussed earlier (Figure 2). To relate this mapping to the core, we have also included five Austrian legacy newspapers with the highest reach (Statistik 2022). In relation to peripheral formats, all these newspapers are located in the upper part of the model as they enjoy high legitimacy. However, broadsheet Der Standard and regional newspaper Kleine Zeitung are comparatively more autonomous and orthodox due to their ownership structure and adherence to the Austrian Press Council's code of ethics. The tabloids Kronenzeitung, Heute, € Osterreich/oe24 are, on the other hand, less autonomous economically and tend to either not be a member of the Press Council (Kronenzeitung) and/or tend to commit the largest number of breaches (Heute, € Osterreich) ( € Osterreichischer Presserat 2022).
Obviously, this stratification is specific to the Austrian case under analysis here and we emphasize that what is deemed heterodox could well be different in other national contexts. However, when thinking of global peripheral actors that are better known, we could speculate about the position of straightforward cases. For example, crowdfunded enterprises like De Correspondent or Mediapart would probably also be located in a similar position as the re-invigorators in our case, and right-wing populist sites like Breitbart would similarly occupy the position of the imposters. Other actors might be more difficult to pinpoint, especially as their positions can arguably change over time, as Buzzfeed's example well illustrates (Tandoc and Jenkins 2017). In this sense, it is worth noting that our mapping should not be considered as static but rather reflecting dynamic processes of changing relations in the field.

Conclusion
Journalistic fields have never been highly autonomous and homogenous; they have always been more open to actors from other social fields and susceptible to influence from external logics (Ryfe 2019). It could even be argued that as a mediator and provider of public information, the journalistic profession had to be open and to some degree dependent on other social fields (Schudson 2005). However, with new technology and increasing digitization, the singular position of journalism has been gradually challenged and more and more actors who have not been socialized to the vision and tacit rules of the journalistic field claim membership to it. While new entrants have the potential to re-invigorate the journalistic nomos, they can also be deviant and introduce new logics to the field. This also shapes the shared understanding and narratives of what journalism is and should be, shifting long-held norms and introducing new ones (Coddington 2015;Vos and Craft 2017). At the same time, journalism has never been monolithic, and some mass media regularly exhibit deviance from the unspoken rules of the field.
In this context, we believe the conceptual model proposed here can help overcome some of the limitations of existing research in this area, in that it enables a more complex and dynamic understanding of peripheral actors in journalism and their positioning in the field. Perhaps most importantly, it curbs past dichotomous thinking between alternative and mainstream or periphery and core when trying to understand new entrants and their impact on the field. By mapping new, alternative, or non-traditional formats and actors with our framework, we can more comprehensively understand to what extent they can truly be considered peripheral, i.e., how close or distant they are to the core. In this way, we may not only better understand what factors influence peripheral actors' adaption to the core but also the core's adaption or response to potentially new routines and practices developed by peripheral actors. The model not only considers the extent to which actors might belong to the field and adhere to its shared tacit presuppositions (Eldridge 2018), but also takes account of the resources which might shape their relative power in the field and the external logics they might bring to it (Bourdieu 1996). By combining the two spectral dimensions of autonomy/heteronomy and orthodoxy/heterodoxy, peripheral and established journalistic actors can be mapped in relation to each other and in relation to what is considered the core of a specific journalistic field.
Thus, such a mapping may, in a very practical sense, serve a heuristic purpose and have pragmatic implications for journalism scholars who want to identify a specific sample in their studies. Moreover, the framework is not confined to universal definitions of heterodoxy or orthodoxy. As these are relational terms and may change in the context of time and space, they would allow scholars to adapt the model to the historic context of journalistic fields across the globe (Cheruiyot et al. 2021). Depending on the specific local, national or trans-national journalistic field, the stratification of the peripheral mapping will differ (Aslan Ozgul and Veneti 2021). Lastly, the model considers peripheral journalists' resources in their position-taking and allows us to account for different interests. For example, we can distinguish between those with heterodox views and understand them in relation to each other to the extent that they bring external logics like political motivations to the field. This, in combination with the degree of antagonism with which they voice their heterodox views, offers a more nuanced understanding of what is occurring in and at the boundaries of the field.
While we examined peripheral journalistic projects' self-descriptions to illustrate our model, we emphasize that this is a limited way of putting the model to use. Selfdescriptions may mask other intentions that platforms may not want to publicly state as part of their mission. Hence, it is important to note that our specific analysis of Austrian peripheral projects is incomplete and was employed purely for the purpose of better illustrating the conceptual model. Future studies applying our model would need to include multiple sources of information and/or methods, such as media data, content analyses, or meta-journalistic discourse analyses, as well as other manifest variables for cultural and economic capital. Likewise, longitudinal and comparative approaches will be necessary to understand peripherality more generally and across time. Moreover, our testing of the model-for reasons of scope-only included peripheral projects that focus on political news in the widest sense. We recognize that journalism scholarship's historical focus on political journalism has neglected the heterogeneity of the journalistic field at large, particularly in relation to journalism and everyday life (Hanitzsch and Vos 2018). Here, a plethora of peripheral and new formats has also emerged in recent years, from influencers to community journalism and expert bloggers. It is essential that further research broaden the scope to include such actors for an even more comprehensive analysis of the journalistic field and its twilight zone.

Notes
1. Since both dimensions of our model are conceptualized as continuums between two poles with distinct names, we refer to those cases that are neither primarily autonomous nor heteronomous (or orthodox/heterodox respectively) as moderately heterodox (or autonomous) to indicate they are somewhere in the middle of either dimension. 2. While we acknowledge that the term 'collaborator' can evoke certain connotations, we use this label here solely in the context of the collaborative role conception which sees journalists as supporters of power elites (Hanitzsch and Vos 2018). 3. It could well be that they criticize them in blog posts, but this was beyond the scope of our analysis.