Street Publications: News Homeless Can Use

Jack Nicholson’s devilish grin fills the full-color cover of the Los Angeles edition of the Big Issue, reminding readers that it is “coming up from the streets” and, in smaller print, that 60 cents of the $1 cover price goes to the homeless person who sells it.

On the back cover is an ad for a hip brand of cosmetics. Inside, ads for Levi’s and Doc Martens help to finance pages devoted to celebrity interviews and articles with headlines such as “L.A. on ten bucks a day” and, yes, poetry and short stories written by homeless people.

From Los Angeles to New York, street newspapers--those pulpy tabloids that double as umbrellas in the rain and litter city streets--are moving up.

There are homeless reporters and editors, a publishers’ association with annual meetings, a homeless news service via the Internet.

“I’ve dined with the governor, a couple of senators. Not bad for a homeless guy,” says David Ward. Through the homeless service agency that produces Street Beat, Ward helped with the late-October launch of a magazine, StreetVoice.

About 50 street newspapers are published in the United States. The granddaddy of the modern era is Street News, which started in New York in 1989 and inspired knockoffs such as Street Sheet in San Francisco and Spare Change in Boston.

“We’re getting better organized, and the movement is growing,” says Tim Harris, chairman of the North American Street Newspaper Assn. and founder of Real Change, a homeless newspaper in Seattle. “People really support the idea of poor people doing things to help themselves.”

In Pittsburgh, Street Beat borrows space in a downtown building where there are apartments and service agencies for the homeless. It claims a circulation of about 1,000, but a readership that includes poet Maya Angelou and author Norman Mailer.

Street Beat’s modest success prompted StreetVoice, with its national news and feature articles, including those on child-rearing and health issues affecting the homeless.

Borrowing a page from the much bigger and glossier the Big Issue, launched in London in 1991, it will give 75 cents of its $1 cover price to homeless vendors. Street Beat, sold by subscription, gives a stipend of $3 per item to the homeless who contribute articles.

Street newspapers claim two camps. Most are by, for and about the homeless and, as a result, are much rougher around the edges. Deadlines are not exact. Employees, some paid, some not, come and go.

On its inside cover, Street Beat--a 50-page black-and-white booklet printed on newsprint--reminds contributors that they must use their real names if they want to be paid.

“Checks, regrettably, cannot be made out to ‘Tarzan,’ ‘BeastMaster’ or ‘Mary Magdelene,’ ” it notes.

But the new breed, best represented by the Big Issue, is glossy and full of general-interest articles. Homeless people sell and profit from the Big Issue but provide only token editorial input. Its weekly circulation in England is 400,000, compared with four-digit figures for some U.S. papers. The Los Angeles edition was launched in April with much fanfare.

Critics worry that such success is quietly eroding the very reason such papers were born: to serve as a voice for the disenfranchised.

“They think that the larger papers don’t value the input of homeless people as much as they should,” Harris says. “I don’t think it needs to be as black and white. I think you can produce a readable paper that is a quality product.”

His own project, Real Change in Seattle, has an annual budget of about $125,000 and includes a writers’ support group and a speakers’ bureau. “That’s all very real and very positive,” Harris says.

As he sees it, the question is whether to produce a general-interest publication that makes money for the homeless or one that is by and for the homeless, a forum for their self-expression.

Proponents of the latter, Harris says, “see the process as being as important as the product, and they see the process of empowerment as being important.”

Workers for Hard Times, a street paper in Los Angeles, complained that the Big Issue would put them out of business. Art Kunkin, managing publisher of the Big Issue, agreed to a meeting with Hard Times workers, mediated by Harris. The result was an agreement of co-existence.

“It’s complicated and it’s messy, and there’s truth on both sides,” Harris says.

Kunkin, who describes himself as a journalist concerned with social change, insists that the Big Issue does not pretend to be “a voice for the homeless.”

Rather, he says, it is designed to be sold by the homeless to middle-class youth.

Efforts to reach a formerly homeless editor for Hard Times failed; her telephone had been disconnected.

Street Beat Editor in Chief Sharon Thorp has been homeless five times in her 48 years--most recently four years ago.

“I had to make the decision whether I wanted to live or die,” she says. “At the time, I didn’t really decide what it was I would live for.”

Today, she knows. She helps others who are destitute or uncertain of themselves.

Though she calls suffering “vastly overrated as a learning tool,” she concedes, “I’m a role model.”