ABSTRACT
Alternative media beget other alternative media. Whether by evolution, emulation, inspiration, exasperation, opposition or merely by dint of some faint trace of collective memory: the creation of alternative media invariably results in the creation of further alternative media. Whatever the quality, content or longevity of such media, their mere existence – even if only momentarily – demonstrates in practice, rather than mere principle, that alternatives are possible. So it was and so it is. After Joseph Gales arrived in America via Germany, having fled England, he edited
the National Intelligencer, within which he once again published the radical and somewhat irascible writings of Tom Paine (Keane, 1995: 468). Gales’ Sheffield Register, meanwhile, became the Iris under the editorship of the poet James Montgomery, who in the 1790s served two prison terms for his trouble (Price, 2008: 19-21). When the Chartist-supporting Northern Star was deemed not radical enough by its one-time editor George Julian Harvey, he launched an alternative to the existing radical press in the form of the Red Republican newspaper, which in turn went on to become The Friend of the People (Harrison, 1974: 125). In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the women’s suffrage movement
spawned many publications: Women’s Franchise prompted Votes For Women, followed by the Suffragette which, during the 1914-1918 war, became the pro-war Britannia while the radical Sylvia Pankhurst broke away to produceWomen’s Dreadnought, later the Workers’ Dreadnought (Pankhurst, 1977 [1931]). Then, when some of those involved in 1960s ‘underground’ publications such as Oz tired of being stereotyped as typists, a second wave of militant women created their own alternative to the alternative in the form of Spare Rib magazine (Rowe, 1982: 15), providing a ‘voice of dissent among the dissenters’ (Phillips, 2007: 52); that, in turn, was too middle-of-the-road for some feminists, who produced their own parody of Spare Rib at one women’s liberation conference because they regarded the magazine as little more than ‘a capitalist cop-out’ (Daly, 2008). This period of ‘second-wave feminism’ saw numerous other alternative
women’s publications launched, including Shocking Pink, Trouble & Strife, Outwrite and Red Rag. Such media also inspired a group of pro-feminist men to produce an anti-sexist men’s magazine called Achilles Heel. There was even a breakaway from the mixed ‘socialist feminist’ collective that produced the Leveller magazine, resulting in the oneoff production of Desire, a publication that saw itself as more ‘feminist socialist’ than the other way round (Gopsill, 2011: 303). Each of these publications was but a single drop in an ocean of ink. As recounted in Part II, the 1970s saw the setting up of alternative local newspapers in
almost every corner of the UK. Although many of these titles had a libertarian-socialist or anarchist(ish) ethos, they tended to place more emphasis on reporting than on sloganeering. Such papers conceived of their role not simply as being in opposition to the frequently right-wing local commercial press but also (as a Leeds Other Paper founder explains in Chapter 3) as providing a more human and more useful alternative to the ‘kind of Socialist Worker propaganda paper’ that so much of the left was – and still is – producing. In doing so, they offered a more journalistic and more open alternative to the classic ‘Leninist model’ of the party newspaper as propaganda-sheetcum-mobiliser (Downing, 2011: 301). Many such papers were consciously informed by examples from the US such as the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which was something of a model for the Liverpool Free Press (Whitaker, 1981: 98). In the more cultural sphere, meanwhile, that same decade saw Punk magazine in
the US help inspire Sniffin’ Glue and a thousand other fanzines to bloom in the UK, from Ripped & Torn in Scotland to Damaged Goods in Yorkshire. However, they were not as innovative as they thought, as the pre-history of the fanzine has been traced at least to the 1920s, and even as far back as the 1870s (Atton, 2002: 55). These do-ityourself punk fanzines had largely disappeared by the end of the 1980s but not before they, in turn and in part, had helped to inspire an even greater proliferation of football fanzines, and even the occasional rugby league one. If the example of punk fanzines combined with ‘the sterility of the official matchday programme’ (Lacey, 1989) had been the immediate inspiration for football fanzines, at least some of those involved were also aware of an earlier alternative football magazine from the early 1970s called Foul, which itself had clearly been influenced by Private Eye and the non-sporting alternative press of that time. Some football fanzines are still going today but many more have either disappeared or morphed into online forums and podcasts.
