On 10/19/06, Bill Quimby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Do moves weakening whatever attraction the alternatives had (in Columbus an alternative, Columbus Alive, was recently taken over by the main daily newspaper and turned into an advertising flyer) mean that there is an opening for a revival of the "underground" press? Probably not, given the production costs and the dedication of left and counter-cultural opinion to the web. I saw one value of the underground press (and after them the better alternatives) to be their public "people" presence - hawkers, street vending boxes, held by readers on the subway/bus, available on the coffee shop racks, and even, yes, as litter blowin' in the wind down Bleeker Street.
Columbus has an alternative non-profit journal, which also has Web presence: The Free Press <http://www.freepress.org/index2.php>. Since it doesn't make any money, it being more Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Suzanne Patzer, and assorted volunteers' labor of love than anything else, it probably can't launch any aspiring journalist's career, but it still exists (among the longest-standing publications of this sort that were started in the long sixties in the USA), so Central Ohioans can make use of it if they want. It has enjoyed something of a financial revival since the 2004 elections -- as Bob and Suzanne took up voting rights issues in a big way, they managed to attract quite a bit of out-of-state Democrat money, so The Free Press even moved into a nice downtown office (nice by the Free Press standard). -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
