Let’s begin with two assertions to frame the story: The moment that a movement becomes newsworthy, it begins to lose control over its narrative. And the more it grows, the harder is is to sustain a genuine exchange of ideas within the movement, and among its constituent individuals.
There is nothing wrong with losing control. It would be preposterous for anyone to claim that a single, coherent, controlled narrative had to emerge from a movement as diverse as the occupy movement. At times, the movement seems to have as many different faces as it has members. We tend to welcome the diversity of views and interests. After all, it is the perceived lack of creative dissidence and political imagination that brought many of us to the camp at St. Paul’s in the first place. The problem, however, arises when “the movement” becomes characterized primarily by what others write and say about it. The inaccuracies begin when journalists and pundits attempts to categorize and classify something that is inherently in flux, constantly morphing and always re-inventing itself. Within a week of the occupation of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, it felt that public opinion was shaped not by people’s personal impressions at the camp but by what The Guardian or The Evening Standard would report. Which, even if well-intentioned, is selective at best. At the same time, the expanding infrastructure of the growing occupy camp in London meant that more people would need to spend more time in working group discussions and maintenance work, and that critical discussions would often happen outside of the twice-daily general assemblies.
The idea for The Occupied Times was born out of these concerns (and, to give proper credit, from the example set by the Occupied Wall Street Journal in New York). On October 19, four days after the start of the occupation at St. Paul’s Steve went to work. He is a trained journalist and professional blogger, and decided to take it upon himself to initiate a newspaper for Occupy London. Within four days, the newspaper went from non-existence to a core staff of almost a dozen, a fully equipped newsroom tent with whiteboards, news desks, a contact database, and a shaky internet connection. Within five days, we had gathered enough content to fill the inaugural edition and secured a local printer that agreed to help us out with a print run of 2000 copies. We had a team of news reporters, editors, copy editors (many of them with professional journalism experience), a photographer, two layout experts who were willing to work night shifts and an ever-expanding cast of willing contributors from inside and outside the camp. Some of us stay at the St. Paul’s camp, some don’t. On October 26, less than a week after our first meeting, issue #1 of The Occupied Times rolled off the printing presses.
It is easy to gloss over the initial challenges with the benefit of hindsight. When we first gathered, we had little but a healthy dose of optimism and a willingness to improvise. No internet? There’s always a Starbucks nearby. No whiteboards? Maybe someone can trade with the tech team. When there is a will, there is most likely a way as well.
While none of us had ever attempted to launch a newspaper from scratch before, our collective journalism expertise proved invaluable. Even in the first meeting, much of the discussion focused on the very real decisions involved in setting up a sustainable publication routine. Would we have a separate editorial department? What journalistic code of conduct did we envision for ourselves? What criteria would we use to select and edit articles? And what layout did we envision for the paper? If anything, we tended to over-engineer the project before being dragged back into pragmatic improvisation. Yet many of these early discussions never ended – we are still meeting to discuss our vision for the paper and its role within the occupy movement. We are still trying to approach each edition with a fresh perspective, and try to make it better than the previous one. So this might be an appropriate place to pause and reflect on a few fundamental questions: What is The Occupied Times? What is it trying to do, and how is it trying to achieve it? Even that question might be contested: Should we aspire to implement a long-term program within a movement that has preserved its fluidity and versatility? And from where do we derive the authority with which we now write editorials?
Indeed, many questions about the newspaper cannot be answered conclusively by us. The paper is very much the product of our shared desires and ambitions. If they change, the paper will morph accordingly. New contributors introduce new ideas as well, and we must not be hesitant in embracing them. The only thing we can do here is share our thoughts.
The paper, we decided, would be published weekly – a schedule that gives us sufficient time to organize 12 newspaper-sized pages of content once the previous edition has been send to the printer and still supplies the camps with a steady flow of coverage. The paper would focus on in-depth news analysis, opinion pieces and longer features. Breaking news would often be published on our website disseminated over the paper’s twitter feed (in any case, these breaking stories are usually picked up by other occupy accounts and outside media outlets as well). In other words: the newspaper would complement rather than replace existing channels of communication and face-to-face discussions. It would be a forum for the exchange of ideas, rather than an official channel or an authoritative indicator of sentiments within the camps. It would be an educational opportunity, educating readers on issues that have thus far ranged from fractional reserve banking to Christian theology and recycling, and coordinating closely with other educational projects throughout the camps. And, finally, it would be a paper that maintained a physical presence at the St. Paul’s and Finsbury Square camps but aimed to transcend the confines of the occupied space by bringing in outside voices, addressing outside readers, and by not shying away from confronting big issues head-on.
Against the narrowing scope of political discourse, we want to pit an army of daring ideas. Against the notion of inevitability, we want to raise challenges of creativity. And amidst the mainstream discourse we want to shine light on paths less traveled.
We are fully aware that a single paper cannot do justice to the variety of opinions within the camp. It is our intention to provide an alternative journalistic narrative and offer a platform for discussion. We hope that campers at the London occupations will learn as much from our articles as visitors who stop to pick up a copy. The Occupied Times is thus a hybrid project: It is a newspaper written by campers for a larger audience, featuring articles that give voice to the range of opinions within the occupy movement. Yet it is also a newspaper for the camp, with features on camp life, portraits of individual occupiers, event listings from Tentcity University and a weekly debate section.
That means we have to straddle many borders. We must reconcile the need for open debate with the constraints of our weekly publication schedule. In relation to the many issues discussed – sometimes very passionately – in the camp, we want to avoid taking sides. Our shared questions and individual convictions outnumber the conclusive answers we can give. We must strive to provide content that is special to someone and interesting to everyone. And in relation to the mainstream media, we want to preserve our independence. We welcome outside voices and attention, but we must not become part of someone else’s agenda.
Above all else, we want The Occupied Times to be a good newspaper. From the beginning, we set high editorial standards for ourselves. For each article, we ask ourselves: Would we be willing to defend the publication of this particular piece, even if we disagreed with its premise or viewpoint? We fact-check, we distinguish between statements of fact and personal opinion, we pay attention to argumentative structures and language. Usually, we work with each contributor through one or more rounds of editing to make the articles as interesting and readable as possible. We want to be read not because of the paper’s name but because of the quality of our content.
We are extremely fortunate to be working with two incredible designers, Lazaros and Tzortzis, who managed to distill all these ideas into a visual template for the paper. Their impossible task: To create something that was radical enough to mark The Occupied Times as a protest paper, and advanced enough to avoid the trap of being dismissed by outside readers and becoming a self-referential and self-absorbed publication by activists, for activists. We settled for a combination of bold typography, large photographs, a readable text font and a back cover that does double-duty as a demonstration placard. Like the rest of the newspaper, the design is always evolving, but we are starting from a very high baseline.
And just like most things at the camp, this paper would not exist without the initiative, personal commitment and helping hands of many. Countless campers have written for The Occupied Times or have helped with a myriad of other tasks, from setting up our newsroom tent to the folding and distribution of the printed papers. Steve, in particular, has sacrificed more than a few grey hairs and nights of sleep to build momentum and keep the paper running.
As we write this, the fifth edition is being shipped to the printer. The Occupied Times is now a familiar sight around St Paul’s every Wednesday, despite a print run of only 2000 copies each week.What started as an ambitious endeavor is starting to look like a legitimate newspaper, we hope, if a little more aesthetically radical. Like the movement itself, those of us producing the paper have had our ups and downs. We’ve had three changes of premises, two changes in format, and one arrest. Is it like this at the Guardian?
The range and quality of content has often exceeded our expectations. We perpetually drift between the surprised realization that another issue has been printed, and the perplexed uncertainty whether next week’s paper will live up to the standard. We have migrated many of our operations from whiteboards and notebooks to an online hub, and have divided up responsibilities for individual pages within the paper. And in producing the newspaper, we have maybe become its foremost beneficiaries: Every one of us has undergone a process of political education and self-reflection.
In many ways, the newspaper appears to us as a microcosm of the camp: There are points of tension and disappointment. We are constantly confronted with the challenge of remaining open to new faces and fresh ideas despite our newly found structures. And we still have to ask ourselves the questions we have been asking for the past month. The answers we are able to provide next week or next month might be very different. As long as change remains an unfulfilled promise and the tents remain on the street, we will be here as well. Writing, editing, publishing, and giving a voice to the many voices of this movement.