by Doug Nufer
The Free Press
What's great about America? Anyone can start a newspaper, magazine, journal, or zine. Once established, these media entities become veritable magnets for all sorts of rewards. As much as we claim that the Free Press is a volunteer outfit whose writers and editors forgo pay in order to finance limited runs of six sixteen-page issues a year, there are perks we can't deny: poetry manuscripts, disco CDs, Home and Garden Show invitations, book-length studies from the Washington Institute Foundation (Privatize the Public Schools!), announcements of men's fashion shows where CEOs strut their stuff on the runway . . . So all right, we're loaded. We're rich. Our back issue library alone represents more collectible value than you'd find at a dozen baseball card shows.
Fortunately, it is this endowment, this accumulation of priceless wealth which shields us from temptation. Software tycoons dangle their browsers so we can reach corporate-owned wire services and timber barons offer to log old-growth forests so we can have newsprint, sneaker manufacturers offer to send us on fact-finding missions to South Korea and companies everywhere offer to write the news for us. We decline.
For anyone who would start and run an independent news journal, that's another great thing about America. Although we won't be bought, so many others will. And that makes doing this worthwhile.
Our back issue library alone represents more collectible
value than you'd find at a dozen baseball card shows.
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Contents this page were published in the March/April, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1998 WFP Collective, Inc.