Occupation Dispatch

The Occupy Wall Street protests now have a newspaper of record, the Occupied Wall Street Journal. The début issue of the OWSJ is four pages long and printed in full color. It’s not yet clear how often it will run—the current issue doesn’t have a dateline—but a second issue is expected today, and there are plans for three more to follow.

The paper's tone is revolutionary: “What is occurring on Wall Street right now is remarkable. For over two weeks, in the great cathedral of capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.” Its editors, Jed Brandt and Michael Levitin, told the actual Wall Street Journal that they started the paper in response to what they saw as insufficient coverage of the protests in the mainstream press. The publication contains no original reporting, concerning itself mainly with explaining the Occupy Wall Street movement to skeptics and rallying others to the cause.

Notable in the current issue is a column by the journalist Chris Hedges (“Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial district or you stand on the wrong side of history,” he writes); a primer on the movement called “Occupation for Dummies,” which previously ran in the Nation and which offers answers to such questions as “How bad has the police brutality been?” and “What would a ‘win’ look like for the occupation?”; and, like any good protest rag, a manifesto. The “Declaration of the Occupation,” was approved by consensus “at the New York City General Assembly in Occupied Liberty Square.” It contends that “upon corruption of the system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors” and that “no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.” There’s also a piece connecting the protests to this summer’s uprisings in Greece, titled “Learning From the World." In a further effort to situate their protests in the context of the European Summer, and even the Arab Spring, the editors include a timeline positing Occupy Wall Street as a successor to these earlier manifestations of political discontent.

Funding for the OWSJ's first issue, which had an initial run of fifty thousand, was raised on Kickstarter. The paper’s founders started with the modest goal of raising twelve thousand dollars, but have since raised over four times that amount; The message on its Kickstarter page reaffirms the paper’s revolutionary, open-source credentials:

Occupy Wall Street Media is not the “official” media of the occupation— there is no official media! This is one attempt by a group of journalists who support the occupation to offer a way for the general public to hear the stories, perspectives and ideas from inside the movement. We think the more voices, ideas and media the better.

And indeed there is rumor of more voices to come: a rep for a protestor’s media group in Boston told the Wall Street Journal that an Occupied Boston Globe (which just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it) can be expected soon.

Origin
Source: New Yorker