The Freep wrote about and was often directly involved in the major historic issues of the 1960s and 1970s, and with the people who shaped them, including the Chicago Seven, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman.

Both the famous and the infamous would open up to the Los Angeles Free Press, from Bob Dylan to the Black Panthers to Jim Morrison[3] to Iceberg Slim.

The paper regularly reported on and against police brutality,[4] covering topics such as the death of journalist Ruben Salazar, and even publishing the names of undercover drug enforcement operatives.

Before becoming an underground comix star, Gilbert Shelton worked for the Freep;[10] his The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers strip started appearing as a regular feature in 1970.

Ron Cobb's underground political cartoons were a regular feature; in November 1969, he created an ecology symbol — a combination of the letters "E" and "O" taken from the words "Environment" and "Organism", respectively — and published it in the Freep, and then placed it in the public domain.

William S. Burroughs, who briefly dabbled with Scientology, and wrote extensively about it during the late 1960s, eventually abandoned it and publicly eschewed it in an editorial for the Free Press in 1970.

[12] Other notable contributors: Native New Yorker Art Kunkin, at the time of the founding of the Los Angeles Free Press, was a 36-year-old unemployed tool and die maker.

The Free Press initially appeared as a one-shot eight-page tabloid, dated May 23, 1964, sold at the annual Los Angeles Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market, a fund-raising event for KPFK.

While the outside pages were a spoof of the Faire's Renaissance theme, featuring cute stories like one about a "ban the crossbow" demonstration, the inside contained legitimate underground community news and reviews.

Because of free speech rules, newspaper publishers could buy vending machines, mount them on street corners chained to posts, and sell their issues directly to the public.

[17] Pat Woolley, later to operate Sawyer Press and the syndicate that handled Ron Cobb, took the papers around to her head shop clients and sold them by hand to drivers cruising the Sunset Strip.

The paper had begun to rely more and more heavily on sex ads for its revenues, and fell into debt after Kunkin bought two expensive Mergenthaler printing presses.

[25] In November 1969, Free Press reporter Jerry Applebaum and a group of staffers, including Alex Apostolides, left en masse after disagreements with Kunkin, to found their own paper, called Tuesday's Child.

[26][27] Shortly thereafter, after Kunkin failed to make an employee tax payment in 1970, the paper was seized by the Internal Revenue Service and temporarily shut down.

[25][29] The note was cosigned by Marvin Miller, a major Los Angeles County sex industry publisher who both advertised in the paper and allowed Kunkin to use his presses after he lost his original printers.

[29] He, in turn, sold the paper to Troy Boal and Don Partrick of San Diego, who formed New Way Enterprises, Ltd. to publish the Free Press.

[31] At this point, contributors and columnists included Jay Robert Nash, Chuck Stone, Nicholas von Hoffman, Ralph Nader, Charles Bukowski, Alicia Sandoval, and I. F.

The new version of the Freep was embodied with a constant online presence[38] and with separate sites for politics and music, as well as "pop-ups" of print editions — as when it was distributed without warning at nearly 100 locations within L.A. — as well as in New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.

[citation needed] The revived Los Angeles Free Press went out of business in 2007,[39] although Finger kept the website LosAngelesFreePress.com active, with archives of past editions available to view for historical reference and/or research.

[40] In 2020, Steven M. Finger and photographer Zach Lowry once again attempted to revive a print edition of the Los Angeles Free Press;[41] by late 2022 that effort had also shut down.

The 1968 comedy film I Love You, Alice B. Toklas features Peter Sellers as a straight-laced lawyer who changes his ways and becomes a hippie, hawking copies of the Free Press .

The final issue of the Los Angeles Free Press is featured in Paul Schrader's 1979 film, Hardcore, where George C. Scott's Jake Van Dorn character places an advertisement of himself as a porn producer in order to find his missing daughter.

[6] It can be put succinctly: the old Los Angeles Free Press, pioneer "underground" rag and one-time vehicle for such alternative spirits, agitators, and wonder-workers as Ed Badajos, Ron Cobb, Earl Ofari, Anne Draper, Tim Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Harlan Ellison, Liza Williams, Ed Sanders, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner, is DEAD.

Swollen with a pull-out, rip-off middle-section of sexist classifieds and now featuring quasi-"acceptable" syndicated columns by Jay Robert Nash, Chuck Stone, Nicholas von Hoffman, and Ralph Nader, the tabloid's become a money-grubbing, almost colorless rival to the L.A. Times.

The "message" here for libraries is that if they've been dutifully subscribing to the Free Press as a genuine example of counter-culture journalism, they'd be well-advised to drop that sub, replacing it with the WEEKLY NEWS ($8 p.a.