On Tuesday, Chris Faraone and I were asked to join our colleague Brian Zayatz of the Shoestring as speakers on a panel about the alternative press by Project Censored and the Society of Professional Journalists. The text of my talk follows.
It is odd to be called upon to put myself back in the headspace of talking about the alternative press and the independent press at this point in my 40 years as a journalist.
Because these days I think there are two kinds of news organizations: the living … and the dead. So far has the news industry fallen; so hard is it for outlets of any size to stay afloat, that it seems like a luxury to concern oneself overmuch about what type of journalism one is doing.
Which is not to say that I don’t care. After all, I come out of the underground press. So far to the left editorially that the alternative press seemed like a bunch of hopeless sellouts to me by 1990 when I founded and ran New Liberation News Service—a wire for about 200 outlets in the radical student and community press of the time that was also a relaunch of the famed Liberation News Service of the 1960s and 1970s with the blessing of its surviving founder Ray Mungo.
But I’m not here to talk about the underground press today. And in any event by 2017, two years after Chris Faraone, John Loftus, and I started the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, we found ourselves becoming the co-owners of DigBoston, one of the 110 alternative news weeklies then remaining in the US and Canada. And I joined Chris and John as an active participant in the trade organization of the alternative press, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia—to the point where by 2021, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, we actually hosted the AAN annual convention in Boston.
And sure, the pandemic economy killed off DigBoston by 2023, but with BINJ still a going concern, Chris, John, and I immediately turned around and started a news publication within an investigative journalism incubator that had never been meant to have one. And we are running that publication, BINJ.News, in what we hope is the finest tradition of the alternative press that I once disparaged as a young punk journo.
So, what is that tradition? Well, Chris’ thinking and mine are at some variance on this matter, but we agree on the important stuff: The alternative press is that press that takes the traditional stated mandate of the journalism trade very, very seriously. We strive to be voices of the voiceless. Tribunes of the people who, first and last, speak truth to power. We cover issues of the day in the public interest. We serve as our remnant democracy’s fourth estate, acting as watchdogs over church and state on behalf of what used to be called the masses. Valorizing the honest and excoriating the mendacious.
But the way we do all that high-minded stuff is what makes us alternative. Where major corporate and public news organizations continue to exist with vast budgets relative to our tiny outlets, we note that the most end up being craven supplicants to the rich and the powerful, the supposed good and great.
The alternative press generally does not do that. And, let’s be real, the alternative press in this era basically never has a chance to do that. Why would any billionaire want to buy us off when they can simply crush us like bugs? But like bugs, we remain difficult to kill off.
We continue to do that one thing that separates the alternative press from the mainstream press: We always punch up, never down. That attitude keeps us on the straight and narrow journalistically and goes a long way toward explaining why the outlets of the alt press have usually had editorial lines on the political left.
That attitude also reflects a calling. It’s why we can look at ourselves in our respective mirrors every morning and feel like we’ve done something useful and helpful with our lives. Even when we’re running on fumes in a world when digital titans are doing their level best to render us irrelevant. With toxic social media algorithms and so-called “AI” and rank propaganda being hurled at the public from every direction 24-7-365.
Even though BINJ itself has been on the edge of financial ruin since the moment we launched on June 30, 2015.
Think I’m kidding? At the present time, BINJ, a nonprofit that struggles to maintain an annual budget of $200,000 as we approach our 12th year of continuous operation, will run out of money some time in August. We’ve been through so many organizational crises that it’s just the normal state of affairs for us long since. I mean, hell, we already lost DigBoston to forces completely beyond our control. And we’re hardly alone in these straits. Where there were 110 alt weeklies in 2017 when we took Dig over, there are perhaps 90 left now. Back in the 1970s, by way of comparison, there were several hundred.
As regards the independent press: Yeah, we’re that, too. Independent of money, sufficient staff, and a proper office, true, but independent where it counts. We are free to publish whatever we believe meets basic journalistic standards of fairness and accuracy. We, like the rest of the alternative press, don’t believe in objectivity though. We don’t pretend to be neutral arbiters floating 500 feet above any fray at all times with pure information entering our heads and emerging from our fingers unsullied by critical or analytical gloss of any kind. The magic trick that journalists from certain storied shops continue to claim to be able to do despite a preponderance of evidence that they and their pay-for-play forebearers have merely been taking dictation from political swells and their corporate masters for over 125 years.
Which is why the alternative press is known for a very literary journalistic style where each reporter is essentially a subject of our own stories. We can write in the first person, if we so desire, and many in our tradition do. Myself included.
We encourage our reporters to endeavor to produce three-dimensional, 360 degree views of every topic from the heaviest enterprise piece to the lightest culture piece. And we believe any story can be interesting if writers are thoughtful. Which might explain why we’ve had over 300 reporting interns over the last several years—including 30 interns this spring alone. We can’t offer them money or fame, but we might just manage to help them understand what it means to be a good journalist … while telling them precisely how and why the news industry, and most especially its nonprofit wing, is doomed—which all too few academic journalism programs have the honesty and/or the ground level experience to do.
Be all that as it may, the line between the alternative press and the independent press is blurred and at this point I think that they’re effectively the same thing and that both BINJ as an organization and BINJ.News as a publication are part of both.
That’s enough introduction to get started, we can cover anything else in conversation for the rest of this workshop. Thank you for hearing me out.
Note: Chris Faraone is a board member and I am the secretary of the New England Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you want to see more reporting like this, sign up for BINJ’s free weekly newsletter at binj.news/signup/.
