At its inception Rancid News was a punk zine, which began circulation in April 2003 with interviews from AFI, One Minute Silence, and Johnny Truant, alongside articles, columns and reviews.
It was compared to San Francisco-based Maximum RocknRoll, due largely to similar political beliefs and style of music covered.
Rancid News was also distributed by many of the Household Name Records bands, including Five Knuckle, Captain Everything!, Adequate Seven, Howards Alias, and Antimaniax amongst others.
People mistakenly assumed the fanzine had something to do with the punk rock band Rancid and it was felt that it forced contributors to focus too heavily on music.
The final issue of Rancid News, published in February 2005, gave an indication of the changing direction, with a greater emphasis on radical culture in general and with particular focus on political articles, vegan recipes and longer columns.
In 2005 two members of the Rancid News collective established the London Zine Symposium, which for the first year was held in the Institute for Autonomy.
[5] It has become an annual event, and in 2009 had over 1,000 attendees with talks given by Roger Sabin, Teal Triggs, Barcelona Zine Library, and Alex Wrekk from Portland[clarification needed], United States.
The website was relaunched in early 2009 and long articles written about the protests against the attack on Gaza,[7] photo essays about the G20,[8] and responses to Ian Tomlinson's death.
Last Hours, in 2010, aims to publish books about the London Zine Symposium, the squatting movement in the UK and a series of posters offering alternative perspectives on subjects such as anarchy, prisons and the general election.