Street newspaper
Although street newspapers have multiplied, many still face challenges, including funding shortages, unreliable staff and difficulty in generating interest and maintaining an audience.
These differences have caused controversy among street newspaper publishers over what type of material should be covered and to what extent the homeless should participate in writing and production.
[7] Thus, one motivation for the creation of the first street newspapers was to counter the negative coverage of homeless people that was coming from existing media.
[1][8] This growth has been attributed both to changing attitudes and policies towards homeless individuals and to the ease of publishing provided by desktop computers;[1][8][16] After 1989, at least 100 papers[17] sprung up in over 30 countries.
[18] By 2008, an estimated 32 million people worldwide read street newspapers, and 250,000 poor, disadvantaged, or homeless individuals sold or contributed to them.
[26] The INSP and the NASNA voted to combine their resources in 2006;[27] they have collaborated to found the Street News Service, a project which collects articles from member papers and archives them on the internet.
[8] The purpose of requiring vendors to purchase papers up front and earn back the money by selling them is to help them develop skills in financial management.
[25] Many develop in a bottom-up fashion, starting up through volunteer work and "newcomers to the media business" and gradually expanding to include professionals.
[42] Specific business models for street newspapers vary widely, ranging from vendor-managed papers that place the highest value upon homeless empowerment and involvement to highly professionalized and commercialized weeklies.
[45] Many feature contributions from the homeless and the poor in addition to articles by activists and community organizers,[6][8] including profiles of individual street newspaper vendors.
[33] The writing style is often simple and clear; social scientist Kevin Howley describes street newspapers as having a "native eloquence".
[48] According to Howley, street newspapers are similar to citizen journalism in that both are a response to the perceived shortcomings of the mainstream media and both encourage involvement by non-professionals.
[49] Unlike most street newspapers, the UK-based The Big Issue focuses mostly on celebrity news and interviews, rather than coverage of homelessness and poverty.
Others operate as a program of a larger social services organization—for instance, Chicago's StreetWise can refer vendors to providers of "drug and alcohol treatment, high school equivalency classes, career counseling, and permanent housing".
[11][54] Organizations in Montreal[11] and San Francisco[54] have responded to these criticisms by offering workshops in writing and journalism for homeless contributors.
[13] Controversy surrounding The Big Issue, the world's most widely circulated street newspaper,[11][12] is a good example of these two schools of thought.
[1] In the late 1990s when the London-based paper began making plans to enter markets in the United States, many American street newspaper publishers reacted defensively, saying they could not compete with the production values and mainstream appeal of the professionally produced The Big Issue[2][50] or that The Big Issue did not do enough to provide a voice to the homeless.
[42] Kevin Howley sums up the division between different street newspaper models when he questions if it is "possible (or desirable for that matter) to publish a dissident newspaper—that is, a publication committed to progressive social change—and still attract a wide audience".
