Why a separate press appeared
In the mid-1960s, many young Americans felt that the established newspapers and broadcasters did not speak for them. Coverage of the antiwar movement, drug use, new music and civil rights protest often came from an older, more cautious perspective. A new group of small papers, usually called the underground press or the alternative press, set out to fill the gap by writing in the voice of the communities they covered.
The idea was not entirely new. Papers such as The Village Voice, founded in New York in 1955, had already shown that an independent weekly could succeed by reporting local culture and politics in an opinionated way. The Realist, a satirical magazine edited by Paul Krassner, was another influence. What changed in the 1960s was the number of papers and their link to a movement.
The first wave of papers
Several titles set the pattern:
- The Los Angeles Free Press, started in 1964 and associated with its publisher Art Kunkin, is often cited as one of the earliest and most influential.
- The Berkeley Barb, founded in 1965 by Max Scherr, reported on campus politics, antiwar protest and local events. It also carried sex-related advertising, which drew complaints and, according to many accounts, helped to pay its costs.
- The East Village Other, founded in New York in 1965, was associated with Walter Bowart and others, and was known for its experimental layouts and its coverage of the Lower East Side scene.
- The San Francisco Oracle appeared in the autumn of 1966 in the Haight-Ashbury district. It was known for lavish colour printing and mystical content, and produced a famous issue around the January 1967 Human Be-In.
- Other early titles included the Fifth Estate in Detroit and the Chicago Seed, which began in 1967.
The papers differed in tone. Some were primarily political, others were devoted to music, drugs and spiritual exploration, and many mixed all three. Few had a settled editorial line.
The Underground Press Syndicate
In 1966, a group of editors set up the Underground Press Syndicate, usually abbreviated to UPS. Its members agreed that each could reprint material from the others without paying, which gave small papers access to articles, cartoons and photographs they could never have afforded. It also circulated a sense of common identity. A story about a police raid in one city might appear in dozens of papers within weeks.
Estimates of how many papers eventually existed vary, since many were short-lived and records were poor. The number is commonly given as hundreds by the end of the decade, and the combined readership was in the millions according to some reports, though these figures should be treated cautiously.
Another important organisation was the Liberation News Service, founded in 1967 by Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo, which supplied news and photographs to the movement’s papers, much as a wire service does for mainstream ones.
What they covered
Underground papers reported the Vietnam War, the draft and antiwar protests in sharper terms than mainstream outlets, and they gave detailed attention to events like the March on the Pentagon. They covered local rock concerts, published listings for dance halls and printed interviews with musicians. They also ran practical information such as legal advice for people arrested on drug charges, lists of free clinics, and personal advertisements. In some cities the papers gave early notice of the Summer of Love and of the arrival of runaways in San Francisco.
Their style was deliberately informal, with a strong first-person voice, profanity and cartoons. Writers admitted bias openly. This connected the papers to the literary experiments described in the article on New Journalism writers, and a few of them, like the Los Angeles Free Press, carried work by established writers. Magazines such as Rolling Stone, founded in San Francisco in November 1967 and covered in a separate piece, grew from the same cultural world but aimed at a more commercial and professional model.
Making and selling the papers
Technology helped. Cheap offset printing and typesetting equipment made it possible to produce a weekly paper with a small budget, in contrast to the heavy expense of older letterpress methods. Layouts could be wild: overlapping colours, hand lettering and psychedelic art, in keeping with the poster style of the period.
Distribution relied on street sellers, often young people who kept part of the cover price, and on head shops, bookstores and coffee houses. This also made the papers visible targets.
Harassment and pressure
Authorities took a hard line in several places. Sellers were arrested for obscenity, vagrancy or selling without a licence, and offices were sometimes raided. Printers occasionally refused to handle controversial material, and advertisers were hard to find. Some papers faced lawsuits or intimidation. In the end, legal cases generally turned on free speech arguments, and several papers survived by winning or outlasting them, though accounts of individual cases differ and are best checked against specific sources.
Internal problems mattered too. Papers were often run as collectives with unclear management, money was short, and arguments over politics, pay and the treatment of women staff were common. Many closed after a few issues.
Legacy
By the early 1970s the underground press had thinned out. Some papers closed as the movements that supported them faded, others lost readers to newer outlets, and a number turned into more conventional city weeklies. Those that survived helped create the model for alternative weeklies in American cities, with their listings, investigative reporting and open commentary. The underground press also stands as a primary source for historians, who read its pages to see how people inside the counterculture and the antiwar movement described their own world.