Feeling the crisis, building the alternative: Women journalists in nonprofit digital media through the lens of feminist epistemology and the affective turn

This article draws on feminist standpoint epistemology and the affective turn to examine how women journalists respond to deteriorating working conditions in Slovenian legacy media. The study focuses on three analytically selected cases of women journalists who co-founded nonprofit, women-led digital media outlets, drawn from 15 exploratory autobiographical interviews. Their narratives articulate experiences of marginalization alongside agentic responses that critically interrogate developments in the legacy media system and call for a rethinking of journalistic ethics and labor organization. Journalism is approached as affective labor, marked by the entanglement of passion, self-exploitation, and precarity, in which emotions such as anger, care, and responsibility – combined with digital affordances – enable the creation of alternative media spaces. These initiatives are interpreted not merely as individual survival strategies but as micropolitical and epistemological interventions that reclaim professional autonomy and integrity. While embedded in neoliberal conditions and structurally fragile, they demonstrate the potential of alternative practices to reimagine journalism from the margins.