Street Newspapers

Street Papers and American Alternative Media

Street papers are rooted in America's rich history of alternative publications that serve socially and politically marginalized groups. Alternative media fill a gap in the media system by discussing issues that are generally ignored by mainstream media.

Historically, the American alternative media have communicated information both internally to minority groups and externally to the public. From the Civil War to the present day, abolitionists, utopians, pacifists, immigrants, feminists, and working-class radicals have used alternative media to voice causes and strengthen community ties. In fact, during the political movements in the 1960s, most issues were first communicated to audiences through alternative media.

Street papers are directly related to the yellow journalism press and radical workers' media that proliferated from the early 1800s through the mid-1900s. The papers emerged largely in response to mainstream publications that ignored issues affecting common people. Many mainstream newspapers and magazines were reaching out to a politically middle-of-the-road readership and avoided covering topics such as workers' strikes and slum conditions. In response to this lack of coverage, the yellow journalism and workers' papers investigated issues such as workers' rights, living conditions of the urban poor, government corruption, and abuses by capitalist businesses. One such paper was Cincinnati's Hobo News, published by the International Brotherhood Welfare Association from the late 1910s to the early 1920s. The paper printed items such as labor news and the personal stories of hoboes.

One prominent predecessor of contemporary street papers was The Catholic Worker, a New York-based newspaper founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day, a pacifist and journalist. The paper was connected to the wider Catholic Worker movement that Day also established. The movement established houses of hospitality in the poorer areas of cities and rural areas, where they are still providing food, clothing, and shelter to those in need. The paper, which still costs a penny a copy, continues to address the important social and political issues of the day. Today there are other Catholic Worker communities in areas across the country that distribute their own journals and newsletters on a local level.

The Social Context of the Development of Street Papers

Even though street papers are grounded in America's rich history of alternative media, they emerged directly out of the social and political environment of the 1980s. Homelessness in the United States worsened during the worldwide recession of the early and late 1980s for a number of reasons, including the shutting down of social welfare programs, the privatization of public housing, a general decrease in [Page 535]affordable urban housing, and financial deficits at the local, state, and federal levels.

It is difficult to estimate the exact number of homeless people for several important reasons. First, it is difficult to define homelessness because homeless people live in situations ranging from shelters and friends' homes to automobiles. Studies that count only the number of people on the streets or in shelters do not capture other situations. Second, homelessness is usually a temporary condition. The most accurate figures are those that measure how many people experience homelessness over time rather than the number of homeless people on a given night. According to Clinton Administration estimates, between 1989 and 1994, 7 million people were homeless on different occasions. The numbers increased by the late 1990s, and after the economic recession of the late 1990s, the Urban Institute estimated that 3.5 million people, 1.35 million of them children, were likely to experience homelessness in any given year.

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