The other papers

Today if you wish to find out what is happening, or read articles of a particular political slant, or follow writers who are not in the mainstream, you can pretty much just switch on the nearest electrical device and get total satisfaction. It has not ever been so, or at least not in the not so distant past.

The history of newspapers is one of ever-increasing centralization. The press that was given freedom by the Founders in the Bill or Rights was an opinionated cacophony of paper, some of which had news and most of which had attacks on one politician or another, some of them far from genteel. President John Adams, while the ink on the Constitution was still not quite dry, was already fed up with the whole thing, and thus we got the famous Alien and Sedition Acts. In a way, the early press, in cahoots with relatively general literacy, is similar to the early days of computing: everybody who wanted could pretty much have access to the means of publication, and publish they did. (Come to think of it, that also sounds like today's computing!)

As newspapers became businesses (think Citizen Kane), competition was fierce. New York after World War II had a lot of papers, morning and evening. Different editions of the same papers were published daily. News hot off the press was literally hot off the press. And then, one after another, the papers started dying off. There are still a few holdouts, but are they the same source of news they used to be?

When the newspaper scene was still relatively heady in New York, there was, nonetheless, a similarity among all of them. The world was going through unique cultural changes, but the papers, aside from being various flavors of liberal or conservative, were nonetheless not a part of those cultural changes, which as far as they were concerned might as well not even exist. Into this countercultural background came, in New York, the Village Voice and the East Village Other, alternate papers that offered not merely a unique political viewpoint but a glimpse into a whole other world. Other big cities started having their alternate papers as well. Journalism started to change. It wasn't about capturing the events in a neutral voice anymore; the journalist could interject his or her own voice into the story. At the extremes (for example, with Hunter S. Thompson), the journalist could become the story.

The internet, of course, makes all of this sound old hat. An article like John Wilcock: The Puppet Master of '60s Underground Newspapers brings it all back so clearly. Read it if you're curious about the mainstream of non-mainstream 60s culture.