The First Underground Press — on this day

the helix, a 1967 underground newspaper from seattle — part of the counterculture press movement the l.a. free press pioneered. source: wikimedia commons

The First Underground Press

On this day in 1966 — The first issue of the Los Angeles Free Press rolled off the press, pioneering underground journalism and counterculture design.

The Los Angeles Free Press was printed on cheap newsprint, laid out with scissors and paste, and sold on street corners. It covered everything mainstream newspapers ignored: anti-war protests, police brutality, underground music, drug culture. Called the Freep, it was one of the first successful underground newspapers in America, founded by Art Kunkin in 1964.

Kunkin was a labor organizer, a socialist, and a printer who believed mainstream media wasn't telling the truth. The Free Press covered the Watts riots from the perspective of the people who lived there, published investigations into LAPD corruption, and ran ads for concerts and political meetings. It treated counterculture as the story.

The design was chaotic. Headlines clashed with body text. Photos were grainy. But the chaos was the point. Underground papers rejected sterile professionalism. They looked handmade because they were handmade.

By 1968, the Freep was printing nearly 100,000 copies a week. Other underground papers followed: The Village Voice, The Berkeley Barb, The San Francisco Oracle. They formed a loose network, sharing articles and covering civil rights, women's liberation, gay rights, environmental activism.

an interior page of the helix underground newspaper, november 1967, showing the psychedelic graphics and experimental layout typical of the counterculture press

an interior page of the helix underground newspaper, november 1967, showing the experimental layout and art typical of counterculture publications. source: wikimedia commons

Underground papers pioneered psychedelic graphics, hand-drawn comics, experimental typography. Artists like Robert Crumb blurred the line between journalism and art. Just as the typewriter had mechanized writing, underground papers democratized design, proving anyone with a printing press could create media.

The movement peaked in the early 1970s and collapsed -- bankruptcy, internal conflicts, government surveillance. The Free Press shut down in 1978. But it had changed journalism, proving there was an audience for radical perspectives. Today it feels like a precursor to the Internet: decentralized, participatory, hostile to gatekeepers.