An alternative news agency (or alternative news service) operates similarly to a commercial news agency, but defines itself as an alternative to commercial or "mainstream" operations. They span the political spectrum, but most frequently are progressive or radical left. Sometimes they combine the services of a news agency and a news syndicate. Among the primary clients are alternative weekly newspapers. Notable alternative news agencies from the past included the Associated Negro Press, the Collegiate Press Service, Liberation News Service, Pacific News Service, and the Mathaba News Agency. Active alternative news services include AlterNet, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, and Inter Press Service. The raison d'etre of a 1970s-era service, Community Press Features, nicely summarizes the ethos of the alternative news agency: "The mass media — the metropolitan daily newspapers, television, and radio — are big businesses and are backed, through financing and advertising, by other big businesses. They naturally tend to reflect and report the concerns of large business interests over those of the rest of the population. And although there are at times significant exceptions (usually moments of crisis, when they can't afford not to) they just as naturally hesitate to report on activities and groups which seriously challenge the legitimacy of those same powerful interests. Rarely will they accurately or adequately present those groups' points of view.'"

History

One of the first alternative news agencies was Associated Negro Press (ANP), founded in 1919 in Chicago by Claude Albert Barnett. Through its regular packets, the ANP supplied African American newspapers with news stories, opinions, columns, feature essays, book and movie reviews, critical and comprehensive coverage of events, personalities, and institutions relevant to black Americans. The Collegiate Press Service (CPS) began in 1962 as the news agency of the United States Student Press Association (USSPA), supplying material to college and university newspapers. (It was later revealed that CPS was at the time was receiving support and covert financing from the right-wing organizations Reader's Digest and the Central Intelligence Agency.) The formation of the international journalist cooperative Inter Press Service in 1964 was vital in filling the information gap between Europe and Latin America after the political turbulence following the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The 1966 formation of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) was key to the co-development of the counterculture underground press and alternative news agencies. By June 1967, a UPS conference in Iowa City, Iowa drew 80 underground newspaper editors from the U.S. and Canada, including representatives of Liberation News Service. LNS, founded by Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo that summer, would play an equally important and complementary role in the growth and evolution of the underground press in the United States. Two alternative news agencies formed in the late 1960s were notable for their coverage of the Vietnam War. The Dispatch News Service, formed in 1968, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970 along with writer Seymour Hersh, for his coverage of the My Lai massacre. Similarly, the mission of the Pacific News Service, formed in 1969, was to supply mainstream newspapers with independent expert sources and reporting on the United States' role in Indochina during the war. The explosive growth of the underground press began to subside by 1970, yet a plethora of alternative news agencies were formed in the period 1971–1973. Only a few of those agencies lasted more than a couple of years, with only two — Earth News Service (ENS) and Zodiac News Service — lasting into the 1980s. Both agencies emerged from the defunct Earth magazine; ENS was later renamed Newscript Dispatch Service. Meanwhile, Jonathan Newhall, another former Earth staffer, formed Zodiac News Service. The Capitol Hill News Service, established in 1973 as part of Ralph Nader's think tank Public Citizen, was later sold to the States News Service, run by Leland Schwartz. The left-leaning news agency AlterNet was launched in 1987 with a mission to serve as a clearinghouse for important local stories generated by the members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (itself formed in 1978). At its start, AlterNet created print and electronic mechanisms to syndicate both the works of AAN papers and freelance contributors, among them Michael Moore and Abbie Hoffman. Alternative news agencies of the 2000s have been mostly characterized as Internet-based news sites (and most have only lasted a couple of years).

Examples

Active

Defunct

Pre-1960s

1960s

1970s

1980s–1990s

2000s

Citations

Sources