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How to Support the Alternative Press

A reader writes, “Could you please give me some ideas on how to support the alternative press?” I can. As a longtime participant, observer, cataloger, collector, and disseminator of small-press publications, I think the best thing a person can do to support them is to subscribe to periodicals that you'd miss if they stopped publishing, and to buy books from small publishers, for yourself and as gifts.

This past year, three-time Utne Alternative Press Award winner Northern Lights ceased publication after a “help us continue” letter failed to garner enough financial support. The Spring 2003 issue of Whole Earth Review has yet to be printed, due to insufficient funds. Dozens of other important magazines continue on the thinnest of margins, many broadcasting calls for support.

Heed these calls. As Mary Sojourner writes in the July issue of Mountain Gazette, “There is more than one way to burn books. . . . There is fiery annihilation, and there is the long slow char of neglect. Northern Lights is gone. Not because of a match held in the hands of right-wing goons but by the failure to act on the part of many of its good readers.”

Here's what you can do:

• Subscribe
• Make cash donations
• Recommend titles to your local public library (ask for them specifically by filling out request forms)
• Consider reviewing them in the newsletters of organizations to which you belong, or on a Web site (your own, say, or that of a friend)
• Buy books from noncorporate publishers
• Shop at independent bookstores,(for more info: www.bookweb.org and www.newpages.com/npguides/bookstores.htm) and encourage your friends and family to do the same
• Read Robert McChesney and John Nichols' Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (Seven Stories Press)

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