Internet: The Virtual Underground

Back in 1970, I sold my first news story. A Bible thumping and violent loony had invaded an Eastern Orthodox church that served the gay and lesbian community in Hollywood, California. As he spouted a sermon of hellfire and the hate of God, he destroyed an altar and assaulted the priest before making a getaway. As luck would have it, I was next door at the time. I called the Los Angeles Free Press, introduced myself to editor Chris Van Ness and told him what had happened before asking if I could write the story. He gave me the go-ahead, and the following Tuesday my byline appeared in 100,000 copies in newsstands throughout the LA basin. The following week, I picked-up a check for twenty-five dollars. I had finally made it. I was a paid writer.

The Free Press, or Freep as it was lovingly called, was the crown jewel among the many underground newspapers that exploded on the scene in the late sixties. Unlike most of the underground rags, the paper was profitable enough to afford to pay all staff and writers. Also unusual for an underground paper, the Freep was highly regarded by the mainstream press for it’s journalistic standards. It was not unusual for articles in the Los Angeles Times to begin with the phrase, “The Los Angeles Free Press has reported in a copyrighted story that...’”

In some ways, they were too good at reporting, for they managed to tick-off the city fathers. The LAPD went on a crusade to discredit the paper, Freep reporters and photographers were targeted and were among the first arrested when the police decided to break-up a demonstration. In 1968, after the paper published the names, addresses and phone numbers of 50 undercover narcotics officers (“In a free society, there can be no secret police”), the paper found itself being sued for $50 million, which buried the paper in legal costs. By the time I sold them my first story, the paper’s founder and publisher, Art Kunkin, had been forced to sell to cover his legal expenses, although he remained at the helm as publisher.

The L.A. Free Press was not the only underground paper during that era. Far from it. Nearly every community in America with a population of “hippie radicals” had it’s own version of the Freep, most with more inventive names and less disciplined journalistic standards. There was the San Francisco Oracle, the Berkeley Barb, the Village Rat and the East Village Other, to name but a few. Here in the South, there was The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta and The Complete Ungarbled Word in New Orleans.

There had been alternative papers before the underground press movement of the sixties (the Bay Guradian in San Francisco and the Village Voice in New York come to mind), but these were mostly journals with a decidedly socialist or communist agenda, papers that had been born out of the workers movement in the 1930s. The underground papers born in the sixties had a much different agenda. Their mission, at least until the advent of “political correctness” ruined everything, was to report the news in a way that stressed freedom, human rights and the legalization of dope. Their mandate was to serve a readership that was radical, mostly anarchistic, and definitely antiestablishment.

Most of these papers didn’t last for more than a couple of years, felled by economic realities that would have been foreseen by any but the most idealistic. Except for the Free Press, which was supported mainly by a personal classified section and ads for strip joints and triple X cinemas, most couldn’t find an advertising base large enough to cover their printing costs. It seems that the business community was reluctant to advertise in a medium that saw business as the enemy. Besides, the underground press’ hippie readership was notorious for having no money.

The underground press, pretty much dead since the mid-seventies, has recently seen something of a revival by way of the Internet. In cyberspace, there are no enormous paper costs and no highly paid union employees are required to run printing presses. The economics of type-it-and-post-it have led to a plethora of web sites that serves a community that includes both old hippies and a younger crowd that wasn’t even born during the golden age of the American underground press.

These virtual underground newspapers are a mixed-bag of old and new. Some were born on the Internet, others are revivals of legendary mastheads from the sixties. For a while, Art Kunkin brought back the Free Press, and Atlanta’s Great Speckled Bird now publishes an excellent site online at http://www.thebird.org.

The new online underground offers many features that would have been the stuff of science fiction back in the days when the papers were published on newsprint. In a virtual reality, interactivity is the game of the day, so sights offer bulletin boards, links to other sites, constantly changing news stories, search capabilities and all of the other trappings of the online world.

There is a downside, however. In the days of newsprint and offset presses, nearly all of a paper’s readership were in the same geographical area. If you lived in San Francisco, you read the Oracle, and knew that all of your friends read the Oracle as well. In Toronto, everyone read Guerilla, or in Bellingham, Washington everyone read The Northwest Passage. The articles, therefore, were about your community. On the street, you might hold a conversation over a particularly thought provoking article that appeared in the latest edition.

Today, the readership of an underground site is spread across the globe. To be sure, the new underground press still services a community, as evidenced by the many friendships and associations that are created through the bulletin boards and chat rooms included in these online sites. But it’s largely a community of people who will never meet. A community of ten thousand living in the same neighborhood wields much more power than a community twice as large spread across the planet.

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