| Company type | Syndication |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1966; 59 years ago (1966) |
| Founders | Walter Bowart,John Wilcock,Art Kunkin,Max Scherr, Michael Kindman, andHarvey Ovshinsky |
| Defunct | c. 1978 (1978) |
| Fate | Defunct |
| Successor | Alternative Press Syndicate (APS) |
Area served | United States, Canada & Europe |
Key people | Tom Forcade |
| Products | Underground Press Service |
| Subsidiaries | APSmedia |
TheUnderground Press Syndicate (UPS), later known as theAlternative Press Syndicate (APS), was a network ofcountercultural newspapers and magazines that operated from 1966 into the late 1970s. As it evolved, the Underground Press Syndicate created an Underground Press Service, and later its own magazine.
UPS members agreed to allow all other members to freely reprint their contents, to exchange gratis subscriptions with each other, and to occasionally print a listing of all UPS newspapers with their addresses. Anyone who agreed to those terms was allowed to join the syndicate. As a result, countercultural news stories, criticism, and cartoons were widely disseminated, and a wealth of content was available to even the most modest start-up paper.
Shortly after the formation of the UPS, the number ofunderground papers throughout North America expanded dramatically. A UPS roster published in November 1966 listed 14 underground papers[1] — a 1971 roster listed 271 UPS-affiliated papers in the United States, Canada, and Europe.[2] The underground press' combined readership eventually reached into the millions.[3]
For many years the Underground Press Syndicate was run byTom Forcade, who later foundedHigh Times magazine.
The Underground Press Syndicate was initially formed by the publishers of five early underground papers: theEast Village Other (New York City), theLos Angeles Free Press, theBerkeley Barb,The Paper (East Lansing, Michigan), andFifth Estate (Detroit, Michigan).[4]
The first official UPS gathering was held at the home of theSan Francisco Oracle's Michael Bowen inStinson Beach, California, in March 1967, with some 30 people representing a half-dozen papers in attendance.[5]
The meeting was chaotic and largely symbolic, and the concept was amorphous. It was hoped that the syndicate would sell national advertising space that would run in all five papers, but this never happened.[citation needed] AsThorne Dreyer and Victoria Smith wrote forLiberation News Service (LNS), the formation of UPS was designed "to create the illusion of a giant coordinated network of freaky papers, poised for the kill". But, they added, "this mythical value was to be extremely important: the shoes could be grown into," and the emergence of UPS helped to create a sense of national community and to make the papers feel less isolated in their efforts.[6]
Walter Bowart andJohn Wilcock of theEast Village Other, with Michael Kindman ofThe Paper, took the lead in inviting other papers to join.TheSan Francisco Oracle,The Rag, and theIllustrated Paper (a psychedelic paper published inMendocino, California) joined soon afterward, and membership grew rapidly in 1967 as new papers were founded (such as theChicago Seed)[7] and immediately joined. First-hand coverage of the1967 Detroit riots inFifth Estate was one example of material that was widely copied in other papers of the syndicate.
The first paper in the deep South to join wasThe Inquisition (Charlotte, North Carolina).Fluxus West, aFluxus offshoot mostly engaged inmail art and self-publishing activities, founded byKen Friedman, was also one of the newest UPS members in 1967.[a]
By June 1967, a UPS conference inIowa City hosted byMiddle Earth drew 80 newspaper editors from the U.S. and Canada,[citation needed] including representatives ofLiberation News Service. LNS, founded byMarshall Bloom andRay Mungo that summer, would play an equally important and complementary role in the growth and evolution of the underground press in the United States.
An attempt that summer by Bob Rudnick to coordinate and centralize the UPS at the offices of theEast Village Other in New York City failed.[citation needed]
Soon after,Tom Forcade took leadership of the organization, opening an office on West 10th Street in New York City, at which UPS curated the underground press collection for regularmicrofilming as well as publishing theUPS News Service.
Offices were relocated toMiami during the summer of 1972 to cover theDemocratic andRepublican Conventions, both of which were held in that city that summer.
By the fall of 1973, the syndicate's offices were located at 283 West 11th Street. The magazine'spost office box was Box 386,Cooper Station, New York, NY.[9]
Under Forcade's leadership, UPS would later also publish theUnderground Press Revue.
As the underground press movement evolved,women's liberation, initially a non-issue in the male-dominated underground press, became an increasing focus. The UPS passed the following resolutions at its 1969 conference:
- That male supremacy and chauvinism be eliminated from the contents of the underground papers. For example, papers should stop accepting commercial advertising that uses women's bodies to sell records and other products, and advertisements for sex, since the use of sex as a commodity specially oppresses women in this country. Also, women's bodies should not be exploited in the papers for the purpose of increasing circulation.
- That papers make a particular effort to publish material on women's oppression and liberation with the entire contents of the paper.
- That women have a full role in all the functions of the staffs of underground papers.[10]
These resolutions were a harbinger of staff rebellions by women that split several papers, includingRat, where the feminist faction seized control of the paper for several issues. A few papers, already weakened by staff burnout, poor finances, and other factors, died in the wake of these schisms, while others lost revenue and circulation by barring sexual content and advertisements, which in any event were increasingly being spun off into tabloid sex papers likeScrew.[citation needed]
Almost from the outset, the Underground Press Syndicate supported and distributedunderground comix strips. Cartoonists and strips syndicated by the organization includedRobert Crumb,[11]Jay Lynch,[12]Ron Cobb,Frank Stack,[13] andThe Mad Peck'sBurn of the Week.
Meanwhile, other cartoonists whose work appeared in UPS-member papers, such as theEast Village Other and theBerkeley Barb, saw their work widely distributed, eventually leading to success in the underground comix industry. Ironically, however, reprints became popular with publishers because underground artists originally had fewclaims on their own work.[14] The open-ended permissions given by UPS were exploited by some underground comix publishers, bulking up or entirely filling their own magazines with work whose creators didn't receive any payment even when those publishers made a profit.
The explosive growth of the underground press had begun to subside by 1970, and by 1973 the boom was clearly over.[4] After a 1973 meeting of member newspapers inBoulder, Colorado, the name of the syndicate was changed to theAlternative Press Syndicate (APS).
APS members sorely needed revenues, and in 1973, Richard Lasky, ex-Rolling Stone Magazine Advertising Director of the successful San Francisco-based weekly, and Sheldon (Shelly) Schorr ofConcert Magazine, published in several cities,[citation needed] created a national advertising media selling company,APSmedia.
APSmedia placed advertising primarily from record and stereo companies with success, placing more than 350 pages of advertising for many of the publications in the bigger markets in the first year. As cities were in the major markets, it mostly sold ads into publications without the advertisers knowing anything more than the names of the client papers.[citation needed] In 1976, APSmedia dissolved.
By 1974 most underground newspapers in the U.S. had ceased publication.[7] APS limped along but had gone defunct by 1978; succeeded almost immediately by theAssociation of Alternative Newsweeklies, founded inSeattle.
Although many of the members of the Underground Press Syndicate/Alternative Press Syndicate were founded when the legendary urban underground papers were already dead or dying, their influence resonated through the 1970s and beyond, both in the proliferation of urbanalternative weeklies and in scores of eclectic papers founded in small towns and suburbs. For example, Long Island'sMoniebogue Press andSuffolk StreetPapers offered general audiences alternative perspectives on local news and culture, whileAkwesasne Notes (published 1968–1992,[15] 1995–c. 1997)[16][17] specialized inNative American politics, including issues of peace and ecology.
"Fluxus West, for example, was one of the six or seven founding publishers of the Underground Press Syndicate in 1967, but we never gained any traction on the way the papers were designed or what they dealt with. Even though we can be found in the first lists of founding papers, along with theEast Village Other, theBerkeley Barb, and theLos Angeles Free Press, we vanish from history soon after because our focus was so vastly different. Did we exert a role in developing the concept of an alternate press? Yes. Did we have any real part in the way the press developed? Perhaps we did, at least in a small way. Did we succeed in directing serious attention to cultural issues beyond the standard underground press focal points of rock music, drugs, sex, and new left politics? Not hardly".[8]
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