"Helping the Homeless to Help Themselves"

STREET NEWS was founded in 1989 by Libertarian Party advocate and Editor-In-Chief, Hutchinson Persons & Co-founder Wendy Oxenhorn. She left Street News after her first year over "philosophical differences on how to run the organization". The paper experienced financial troubles in the early 1990s due to embezzlement of funds. Richard Moskowitz, who started as a vendor for SN, threw out Hutchinson [literally out the window and into the streets on his head], over suspicion of stealing from the company till. Mr. Moskowitz immediately became managing editor and publisher. He then hired Bryan Adrian to be his deputy editor and feature writer, keeping Janet Wickenhaver on the staff as his assistant publisher. Later the paper was taken over by its printer, Sam Chen of Expedi Printing, after heated battles and quarrels with Moskowitz and Adrian, who did not want to let go of the paper during a slump in sales. Chen attempted to turn a profit from Street News, but he was no match for the talent and skills of the Moskowitz/Adrian partnership, and he was quickly unsuccessful. By the mid-1990s, Street News' sales had dropped significantly and some predicted that the newspaper was going to end, especially after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani supported the crackdown on panhandling and peddling in the subways. Nearing Christmas Day in 1994, Ms. Wickenhaver told the New York Times that the five-year-old tabloid-size paper was $15,000 in the red. She said the owner, [a printer who turned owner, Sam Chen, the same who had thrown out Moscowitz and Adrian in an internal budget/power coup], had ordered the shutdown after concluding that he could not cover the printing costs any longer.

In April 1996, John "Indio" Washington took the reins at the troubled newspaper. "I became the first Native American Indian Editor in Chief of SN," he says. "Sales went up to 20,000 per issue thanks to our staff of reporters, vendors 'n, of course, our readers! We are still the only for-profit homeless paper in the United States," he said at the time.

On September 11, 1997, in Seattle, Washington, "SN" (STREET NEWS) received an award from The North American Street Newspaper Association for "inspiring the modern street newspaper movement.

Modeled on Street News, several years later, a parallel type of newspaper opened in London called THE BIG ISSUE. Street News inspired over the next decade, a global basket of homelessness issues news publications. Germany has 19 such periodicals, with combined annual sales of 4m. Norway, which counted only 6,091 homeless people in the latest national survey in 2009, publishes ten papers with a combined circulation of 133,000—up 10,000 on 2011. (Many of its sellers are poor but not technically homeless.) Local `versions of Britain’s Big Issue have recently got going in Nigeria and Macedonia. Australia’s title sells 33,000 a week, up from 7,000 in 1996. Oddly, street papers are faring worse in the countries where they began. America’s pioneering Street News, which started in New York in 1989, closed in 2007. No replacement has emerged, though the city’s shelters count a population of well over 59,000 homeless people.

Publishing manager, Richard Moskowitz

Willie Baptist http://universityofthepoor.org/get-youre-organized-take/ Willie Baptist is a formerly homeless father of three who came out of the Watts uprisings and the Black Student Movement. He has 50 years of experience educating and organizing amongst the poor and dispossessed including working as a lead organizer with the United Steelworkers, as an educator and organizer with the National Union of the Homeless, as the Education Director of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union for 10 years, and as a lead organizer and educator for the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, as well as many other networks. He is a Board member of the National Welfare Rights Union, the United Workers of Maryland, Picture the Homeless in New York. Willie presently serves as the Poverty Initiative Scholar-in-Residence and Co-Coordinator of Poverty Scholarship and Leadership Development for the Kairos Center. Willie is the author of numerous books, articles, and pamphlets including Pedagogy of the Poor, A New and Unsettling Force: Re-igniting Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, It Not Enough to Be Angry, Lessons of the Poor organizing the Poor: 5 Main Ingredients and the 6 Panthers Ps. Willie presently serves as the Poverty Initiative’s Scholar-in-Residence and Co-Coordinator of Poverty Scholarship and Leadership Development for the Kairos Center. http://universityofthepoor.org/get-youre-organized-take/