Jul 28, 2010, Vol: 17, No: 30
This weekend, several of our staff will travel to Chicago for the North American Street Newspaper Association conference. Chicago, in 1996, is where it all started, when Chicago street paper, StreetWise, the National Coalition for the Homeless, and Real Change organized the first gathering of streetpapers on this continent. In the summer of 1997, Real Change hosted NASNA’s founding conference at the University of Washington. More than 30 streetpapers from the U.S. and Canada came here to create a mission statement, hash out articles and bylaws, and build a movement.
There was an epic floor fight over whether NASNA would operate by consensus or Robert’s Rules, in which the latter narrowly prevailed. The majority of the West Coast delegation read this as capitulation to the corporatist agenda that I, weirdly, was thought to personify. Some walked out, and would not return for years.
Apparently, my preference for efficiency and my openness to advertising as a revenue stream left me vulnerable to the charge. That a twice-monthly streetpaper with two staff, a budget of less than $200,000 and a print run of 10,000 could be regarded as “corporate” was a measure of our new movement’s extreme sensitivity to the issue. Streetpapers were something new, and cooptation was our mutual enemy, whether we all realized it or not.
This week, I’m reading Jane Jacobs’ “The Economy of Cities,” in which she argues against Adam Smith and the prevailing wisdom of 1969 that urban areas are, and always have been, the locus of innovation and the creation of new work. Her formula – Division of labor plus Added new activity equals new Division of labor (D + A = nD) – is easily applied to the streetpaper movement.
In this instance, the previously existing community newspaper model adapted to the new reality of mass homelessness to create something that, for decades, had not existed in newspaper form: a low-threshold means of employment that offers opportunity for cross-class community and innovative organizing. A few seminal papers that started circa 1990, in turn, spawned what has become a global movement.
This creative process, Jacobs argues, parallels one found in the arts. We must, she says, be “alert to messages that come from the work, and act upon them.” Businesses that are overly wedded to their own rigid divisions of labor tend to lose that adaptive edge. As Real Change prepares to begin a new round of visioning our future, this is an insight worth hanging on to.
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