The Underground Press Goes Straight
WARWICK, MAL
TURNING TO THE COMMUNITY The Underground Press Goes Straight BY MAL WARWICK Berkeley rE just folded," a a young editor wrote me early this year. "San Antonio, Texas, a community of over a million...
...While retaining a healthy skepticism, community papers have assumed a far more responsible stance, again holding out the promise that this will prod the commercial media to examine official statements with a properly critical eye...
...Unlike many of their commercial counterparts, however, the new community papers are seldom inclined to tone down, or drop, a story for fear of offending an advertiser...
...and so far few businessmen have canceled their accounts because of political disagreements...
...We were bringing in a 50 per cent ad ratio, but we wanted to fill our pages with our politics, not ads, and no press in the Bay Area could run more than 32 pages...
...In addition, while the number of pages in most daily and Sunday papers has increased in recent years, the proportion of space devoted to news and analysis has been substantially reduced...
...At its peak the underground press was a powerful social force, a source of much creative innovation and a pioneer in exploiting the potential of the latest print technology...
...We put out a paper with a so-called Marxist-Leninist line which didn't have any relevance outside the office...
...Often anticipating by many months issues that would later become "news" in the commercial press, it served as the single medium credible to millions of disbelieving young Americans...
...Two young women in the office who were distastefully eyeing me for signs of bourgeois deviationism narrowed their faces into an expression just this side of a grimace, while a third staffer, a grizzled 30-year-old who is one of the old men of the LNS collective, pounced on my obviously sensitive phrase...
...The alternative was to stuff in an insert, which would have been prohibitively costly...
...The Cambridge-based Community Press Service (CPS) recently offered the following description of the newspapers it serves: "The common purpose which unites them is to educate and mobilize their communities...
...But keeping a small weekly alive is a precarious undertaking even in the best of times...
...For the most part, they're not the same papers, they're not even being published in the same places, but they're active and viable and growing...
...in this way, for example, the Phoenix New Times keeps its press run at a steady 35,000...
...With small, usually volunteer staffs and minimal budgets, these papers are taking on large industrial and real estate interests, political machines, and government bureaucracies, and they have to do so without the vast resources which are available to the commercial press...
...One does not find in them a sense of outrage for its own sake, the flaunting of drugs and sex, or the promotion of unalloyed violence as the "final solution...
...Many of the flourishing community papers, moreover, are in areas rarely associated with the turbulence of the last decade: Iconoclast (Dallas), The Washington Park Spirit (Albany), New Times (Phoenix), The Drummer (Philadelphia), The Daily Planet (Miami), The Bugle-American (Milwaukee), The Door (San Diego), Straight Creek Journal (Boulder/ Denver), The Point (Providence...
...The underground papers represented the opposite side of the coin, disbelieving anything reported by a public spokesman...
...Chastened by the public's rejection, the most dedicated activists have abandoned the self-congratulatory rhetoric of the '60s and turned their journalistic attentions to their own communities...
...It would be a mistake to assume, however, that the underground press has simply gone the way of flagpole sitting and the hula hoop...
...Besides their comparative sobriety, today's community papers distinguish themselves from their predecessors in their attitude toward advertising...
...The evidence to support him is in Missoula, Montana...
...San Antonio, Texas, a community of over a million souls, now has no 'underground' paper...
...Jerry Applebaum, an active member of the Tribe for two years, sums up the paper's experience more bluntly: "The failing of a lot of the political papers . . . was that they tried to take a vanguard position...
...Reflecting the more realistic outlook of young people today, they have settled down to the slow, hard work of incremental social reform...
...Now only peripherally involved with national causes, they concentrate on local issues, covering them in a sober and thorough fashion, playing down advocacy in favor of objectivity, and often engaging in controversial investigative reporting that would raise eyebrows at Newsday...
...The problem was solved eventually when our advertising revenue dried up" as the paper's politics veered further to the Left...
...In other cities their example has provoked previously somnolent established papers to sharpen their local coverage...
...The CPS makes still another valid point: "Locally as well as nationally, newspapers have become disturbingly dependent on the news handouts of governmental and corporate bureaucracies and 'experts' for their content and editorial outlook...
...If their antecedence is apparent, it is because they tend to retain UPS membership and to emphasize rock music in a manner at least faintly reminiscent of the old counterculture papers...
...With Mal Warwick, a free-lance writer based in Berkeley, was formerly an editor of the Alternative Features Service, a national syndicate for college and community newspapers...
...Lancaster, Pennsylvania...
...Indeed, in ultraconservative parts of the country like San Diego, Phoenix or Dallas-where the commercial dailies are owned for the most part by Right-wing publishers and often deliberately ignore legitimate local news-These weeklies are frequently the sole source of information about controversial community affairs...
...Though the underground press of the '60s lost its revolution, dying as quickly as the grandiose fantasy of instant change it trumpeted, the new community papers are being sustained by a wiser generation of writers and editors...
...Community newspaper staffs sometimes grumble about advertisers' demands for space, but almost always the economic imperative prevails...
...LNS claims to provide its twice-weekly news packets to over 600 papers in all...
...Their naive struggle for a New America has been transmuted to a more pedestrian fight for their daily bread...
...In the torpor of the Nixon years, most underground editors, writers and artists have left their cluttered, poster-lined offices to pursue paying jobs in establishment journalism, return to school, begin white-collar careers, or seek out other forms of political action...
...Carbondale, Illinois...
...Visiting the clammy warrens of the Liberation News Service (LNS)?about the closest thing there is to a nerve center for the radical youth press-T raised the question of the "death of the underground press...
...the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), a loose cooperative-like agency supported by the papers themselves to pool copyrights and garner national advertising, claimed a figure closer to 20 million...
...It remains to be seen, of course, whether the latest incarnation of the youth press will be more successful than the last...
...As a result, a considerable number of new papers have begun to publish in different parts of the country...
...and it is common for newspaper monopolies to own radio or television stations, further homogenizing the flow of information to the public...
...Hell," he said, a slight trace of defensiveness rising in his voice, "there're more underground papers now than there were two or three years ago when some liberal journalist decided the Movement press had passed its peak...
...We are beginning to realize that our idea of how the American revolution is going to happen has been a little narrow and unimaginative...
...Charlotte, North Carolina-To name only a few of the small and middling-sized towns and cities on LNS' fist of Movement-inspired "community newspapers"-as well as in the more populated urban centers...
...Some guarantee their circulation figures by distributing bundles of free copies on nearby university campuses...
...Gone, too, are Washington's Quicksilver Times, the Berkeley Tribe, the Seattle Helix, the Chicago Seed, New York's Rat, Boston's Old Mole, and dozens of others...
...As is the case with all publications, the fate of these papers will ultimately depend on their ability to answer the special needs of the communities they are trying to serve...
...Nonetheless, they are succeeding in filling an important need for their communities, and represent an important step toward increased community power and responsibility...
...On the whole they aim to please the eye, too, with neat layouts and crisp graphics...
...Reflecting on the Tribe's experience, typical of the underground press of the '60s, Ap-plebaum recalls: "We were in a crisis our first year...
...circulation down to 7,500 from 40,000 at its inception three years earlier, the Berkeley Tribe-a nationally recognized voice for the extreme Left-confessed in its May 1972 valedictory: "Because our own internal politics were vague and unclear and our internal relationships liberal and unchallenged, we were not able to shape a direction for the paper...
...more than half the total circulation is supplied by chain-owned papers...
...Would you be able to help me find a job...
...Except for a very few hearty holdouts, the counterculture presses that flared into prominence in the media-mad '60s-and for the rest of the decade offered up to a mind-boggled public a heady brew of apocalyptic politics and the New Amorality of sex, drugs and rock?have expired...
...In a Federally sponsored survey, National Media Analysts estimated its aggregate readership at 10 million...
...Publishers Weekly calculated that 7.5 people read each copy of an underground newspaper, as opposed to only 0.7 for a regular daily...
...Most of these are far more serious ventures in alternative journalism than their precursors of the '60s...
...The revolution is over-we lost...
...At present, only 3 per cent of the nation's cities have competing dailies under different ownership...
...Springfield, Massachusetts...
...Primarily addressed to young trade unionists, liberal students, minority groups, and women concerned with feminist issues, the new community papers generally attempt to maintain professional standards of accuracy and reliability, as well as the broad circulation and regular advertising income necessary to insure their financial survival...
...Should the former underground press continue to mature, it could provide a refreshing stimulus to journalism as it is practiced in the great American hinterland...
...But the demands of producing a weekly or biweekly newspaper forced many Movement activists to make a protracted and painful re-evaluation of their political effectiveness (they rarely questioned their success as journalists...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 15
