Founded as an underground newspaper centered on anti-war and student activist issues, after the winding down of the Vietnam War it successfully made the transition to the alternative weekly format focusing on lifestyles, alternative culture, and investigative journalism, while continuing to espouse progressive politics.
The Free Press (still alive in greatly altered form in its fiftieth year) was founded by a large cast of volunteers including Steve Abbott, Bill and Sandi Quimby, Paul Ricardo, Cheryl Betz, John Hunt, and Roger Doyle, with many others; some of the early founders were on the staff of the Ohio State University library.
In the early days the paper's distribution center, drop-off point and unofficial hangout was a High Street headshop called Tradewinds; and after several members of the staff were arrested in May 1972 and the regular office seemed unsafe the paper was produced for a time in the basement of Tradewinds.
The Free Press survived the ending of the Vietnam War, which deprived many underground papers of their raison d'être, and in 1974 it raised its print run from 2,000 to 10,000 copies and became an advertiser-supported free giveaway newspaper, following a model increasingly adopted by many other alternative papers around the country at that time.
As a result of an FOIA request it was discovered years later that the FBI had an informant inside the core staff at this time filing regular reports.
Mary Jo Kilroy, one of the editors of the paper during these years, later served in Congress, representing Columbus in a seat formerly held by a Republican.
Members of the Free Press were also participants of a citizen movement that opposed the Columbus Zoo tax levy in the 2014 local elections, this despite the Free Press itself being a recipient of tax money to support its own publication (now cut back from weekly to monthly due to lessening revenues).