The News from the Street

I didn’t really want to sell newspapers, but it was either that or die on the streets,” says 27-year-old Glasgow resident Stephen Strang, once a homeless alcoholic who now has a place to live, a job and a bank account — all thanks to a newspaper called The Big Issue. Newspapers like The Big Issue, sold on the street by the homeless as a way to get them back into society, are thriving. More than 40 are available in major cities in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. The Big Issue — which has five regional editions across the U.K. — has a national weekly circulation of 253,000 and annual revenues close to €30 million. But some fear that the lure of profits is distracting publishers from their primary goal: to help the homeless. “We understand the risk: you have a thriving business and it’s tempting to feel like taking an incentive,” says John “Indio” Washington, editor of the New York-based homeless paper, Street News. “We don’t do it, but it happens at some papers.”

The European homeless newspaper formula was devised in 1991 by Gordon Roddick, a co-founder of the Body Shop, who launched London’s Big Issue in 1991 with the help of the philanthropist A. John Bird. London journalists volunteered to put the paper together and organize the printing, while the city’s homeless were recruited to hawk the rag. The vendors were given free copies to get started, and when those sold they used part of the proceeds to buy more copies to sell.

The formula worked so well that it was soon copied throughout Europe. “And many of the papers followed the example of the British Big Issue — they used profits to start foundations to provide shelter and food, and create new jobs in other areas of the economy,” says Mel Young, president of the International Network of Street Newspapers, a trade organization. The Glasgow Big Issue has even linked up with the Bank of Scotland to help homeless vendors open bank accounts. The formula certainly worked for 33-year-old Parisian Jean-Claude Badge, a former addict who now has a job at the public library in the Lyons suburb of Villeurbanne. “Without the chance to sell Macadam Journal [a Paris mag] in the street, I’d still be living there,” he says.

But some papers are accused of letting the profit motive overtake the charitable one. “Throughout Europe,” says Young, “we’ve had problems with rogue papers that use the homeless as a source of cheap labor without helping them rejoin society.” In Paris, three journals waged a circulation war — the result was lower pay for vendors and a drop in quality. Martine Vanden Driesche, the editor of Macadam Journal, has accused some of her fellow Parisian papers of exploiting the homeless to make a quick profit. “[They] are nothing less than frauds published by crooks,” she says. It’s never easy for the successful to remember their rough beginnings; for homeless journals, nothing’s more crucial.