Street News May Fold p. 16

By: Shawn "Cal" McAllister

Newspaper with the unique concept of empowering the homeless
through their employment as paper vendors will likely put its
February issue to bed and say good night to New York City sp.

NEW YORK'S STREET News, once the model newspaper with the unique concept of empowering the homeless through their employment as paper vendors, will likely put its February issue to bed and say good night to Gotham.
Suffering form a bad public image, tougher city ordinances for street vendors, and a reputation for poor editorial quality, the paper's publisher, Sam Chen, of Expidi Printing, will pull the plug if a new source of income is not found soon. Chen has printed the paper out of his shop pro bono for the past three years, rolling up a $15,000 debt.
When the paper hit the streets five years ago, no one thought the bottom would drop out. At least, not this fast.
Founded in 1989, Street Aid was the brainchild of Hutchenson Persons, a street musician and native New Yorker who dreamed of shutting down Times Square for a rock concert benefitting the homeless.
Incorporated as a nonprofit operation, he generated more than $250,000 to put on the show, but soon realized it was far less money than he would need to pull off the concert. He had been keeping investors informed with a monthly newsletter, which supplemented news of his progress with general information about the homeless crisis in New York.
The chances of the concert diminished every day. Persons needed to back out. He needed to think of something, but the show was not it. Then he found the answer, right in front of his face. Though the music never sounded, the concept of Street News was born, to the tune of a 100,000-monthly circulation and 2,000 Street News vendors.
The homeless, acting as independent contractors, buy the paper for a quarter, then sell it for $1. The vendor keeps the 75? difference, both as a sales incentive and an outstanding commission. The 25? price of the paper offsets production costs and works as a tool for financial responsibility. The vendor knows he needs a few dollars to get started the next day.
Street News evolved into the international model for its genre. Using the homeless as independent contractors proved to be an enterprising idea, and was imitated in other U.S. cities and Europe.
"Street News was the perfect thing for its time," said current senior editor and occasional vendor Caverly Stringer. "People were growing unsympathetic toward homelessness. The paper gave them a way to contribute and get something for their money.
"People were tumbling all over our vendors, trying to pick up the paper," he said. "There was nothing in the world like it, and the public was excited to see so many people working again, instead of panhandling. But, today, it's a different situation."
After several months as a media darling, the paper began to see things change.
"The press had been giving us accolades," Stringer said. "Then, they started going after us."
Most say the tumble from grace began immediately following Chris Wallace's critical "20/20" interview with founder Persons.
"Hutch wasn't the best with the press," Stringer reflected. "Wallace asked him what happened to all of the housing and shelter Street Aid was supposed to generate. What Wallace didn't understand, and still to this day has never been clarified, is that the $250,000 raised was a facilitating amount which was going to be put into the concert, and the concert would generate the program services [food and shelter assistance]. Hutch said the paper was the program services.
"Wallace said something to the effect of 'You were supposed to provide shelter, food and clothing for the homeless, and instead started your own little newspaper. That doesn't look like "program services" to me.'
"Hutch got furious," Stringer said. "Shortly after, he shut out the lights and kicked everyone out of the office. The press had a field day with that."
Janet Wickenhaver, associate publisher/editor of the paper, agreed.
"Things looked incriminating," she said, "but he wasn't very media-savvy."
Also drawn to question was Persons' salary. At $50,000 annually, it now seems a little plush. But Wickenhaver said it didn't seem that way when things were going well, and the money was there.
"It didn't seem that bad then, from what I understand," said Wickenhaver, who joined the team in June 1993, several years after the problems began. "The money was there, from the vendors to the staff. He may have taken a few cabs instead of subway rides, but nothing irrational," she added.
The "20/20" piece sparked an investigation, which, according to Wickenhaver, never found the smoking gun:
"More than anything else, the investigation proved Persons was a sloppy fool, but not a crook," she said.
The media's skepticism, giving rise to the same rumors that hurt the paper years ago, is kept alive by the homeless activists and journalists today.
"The only time we ever hear any of that anymore is from reporters and activists who ask questions like 'Aren't you the ones who got nailed for making money for just using the homeless for profit?' " Wickenhaver said.
Reeling from bad press, Persons recognized the downward spiral. Though public demand initially brought on a second monthly edition, the paper's circulation had fallen from more than 200,000 per each edition to 14,000. Persons jumped ship. He dissolved Street Aid in July 1992, taking with it the paper's nonprofit status.
According to Wickenhaver, nonprofit status for a corporation cannot be transferred when the company changes ownership; it must be reapplied for. The printer, Sam Chen, inherited the full mess in August that same year, and never reapplied.
"It was a most complicated, legal matter," Chen said. "Street Aid could still be around, but not as the newspaper. That lost status right away. But my personal philosophy was that wouldn't matter."
Chen brought a new idea to the newspaper.
"I was going to apply for the nonprofit status in the beginning, but then I realized it was against our goals," Chen said. "We wanted the paper to stand on its own, not ask for a handout. The homeless are no longer panhandlers or charity cases, so why should the organization be? That's not what we're about."
As times continued to get worse, Street News cut five full-time staffers. In June 1993, they found Wickenhaver, formerly the editor of the Manhattan Spirit. Wickenhaver's task was to create some editorial quality ? a last-ditch effort to make the newspaper popular again.
"We got rid of the celebrity fluff, which wasn't that good anyway, and tried to become more like our image, with the stories from the street," she said. "We looked for an edge. I recruited writers and had some incredible stories walk right through our front door."
Unfortunately, with the image already emblazoned in the public's mind, those restructuring efforts failed.
And, then, came the final nail in the coffin.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority passed a regulation stating Street News vendors could no longer sell on the train, and their primary target audience was lost.
"Just as we had revitalized Street News' editorial and readership, the MTA came to us and pretty much said,
'We don't want your people on the subways anymore,' " Wickenhaver said. "That about knocked us back to square one ? 70% of our readers were buying the paper on the train."
Some say the ban is a clear violation of the First Amendment; others describe it as a necessary law. Everyone says it probably doesn't matter. Eleventh-hour efforts to save the struggling publication may be too little, too late.
The paper has been off a regular production schedule for several months. After returning to monthly publication in December, the paper was forced off track again. It currently comes out somewhere close to the beginning of each month, but will more likely be published twice in the next three months. With just one issue left under contract with Expedi Printing, the February issue is indefinitely on hold.
Efforts to save the failing paper have been obstructed by conflicting views on how the paper should be structured.
"We have several for-profit investors and we're still getting calls, but people don't want to invest in the papers if they don't get to say what goes in it," Stringer said.
Though the investors' demands don't seem excessive, Stringer said it will be tough to get everyone's ideas on the same page.
"Different people have different ideas, but we're a different kind of paper," he said:
"We have a mission here, and some people just don't understand that. We cannot just put whatever we want in the newspaper. The same thing that made us so popular is stabbing us in the back."
Street News is the first paper of its kind to run into such trouble thus far. San Francisco's Street Sheet circulation is an even-8,000 monthly, while StreetWise in Chicago has taken over the national spotlight with a biweekly circulation hovering around 65,000.
The world leader is England's Big Issue, which sells 140,000 weekly out of London alone and has distribution spots all over Europe.
But Stringer said that doesn't surprise him. "We were there, too," he said. "Even better. You couldn't get numbers like ours anywhere. I just don't know if we're going to get a shot at getting them back."