Alt-Media, Then and Now

Aaron Boehmer discusses the visual language of underground and alternative newspapers and how they subvert mainstream media through design.

By Aaron BoehmerMay 17, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Politics

CYANOTYPES OCCUPY a peculiar position, mostly because they manufacture a photographic image without a camera. Instead, you coat a naturally absorbent material in a solution of iron salts. Once the material is dried, you press the object you’d like to capture an image of against it. After it’s exposed to ultraviolet light—a light box, UV lamp, or sunlight—and rinsed in cold water, the coated material renders a negative image of the object.

In his 2023 series of cyanotypes on stucco, called Reruns, Southern California artist Evan Apodaca renders the most apt image of contemporary newsmaking I’ve seen. In one of the prints, a headline reads, “Navy Acts to End Local Strike.” In the next, an issue of The San Diego Union announces, “Defense Strike Spread Threatens.” The bottom halves of the broadsheets crinkle and fold onto themselves.

Perhaps this signals to us how newspapers soon turn into garbage on the sidewalk. Step closer to the works and you see the surface of the prints slowly chipping away, obscuring entire words. Maybe this suggests how coverage of something like a labor strike is so often warped. Over time, the narrative will shift even more: stucco is prone to cracking.

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In some ways, 2020 saw a reincarnation of the 1960s, if only for a short while. That year, the Los Angeles Free Press, a member paper of the Underground Press Syndicate of the 1960s and ’70s, started up again for a couple of months. The so-called Freep’s minimalist nameplate, stamped with “FREE PRESS” in thin uppercase, stood in sharp contrast to the Gothic lettering of mainstream outlets like the Los Angeles Times. In Freep’s last issue of 2020, the front page read, “Will Nixon Cancel the Elections?” and then, at the bottom of the page, “Impeach Nixon Now”—with both mentions of Nixon struck through and replaced with “Trump.”

In the last two years, though, the protest paper as a vehicle for dissent has returned in more earnest ways. In 2023, a coalition of media workers united under the cause of Palestinian liberation launched The New York War Crimes, a free newspaper that—within its written content and visual design—argues that The New York Times’ news coverage has manufactured consent for the ongoing, decades-long genocide of Palestinians (The Times’ slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” is reworked as “All the Consent That’s Fit to Manufacture”). At the top of each of War Crimes’ broadsheet issues sits “The New York Crimes” in a traditional Old English typeface. A caret wedges a single word between “York” and “Crimes,” handwritten in red: “WAR.” A newsroom of record is renamed as one of repression—not flattened or parodied but corrupted from within, using its own traditional design elements against it. Editors of the War Crimes told The Baffler that they’re “weaponizing the widespread visual recognition of the Times as a voice of authority.” They go on to say that the alt-paper “is constitutively a form of media critique […] printing things the Times won’t print, like Palestinian people, who are made invisible in the Times.”

It is here that we see how alternative and underground newspapers utilize their form for further function. Whereas The Times might take out an entire spread of their broadsheet for a reserved advertisement space (because traditional journalism is a business, first and foremost), the War Crimes colors their back-page spread a bright, saturated yellow and overlays it with imagery of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—a broken border fence in Gaza City. In the center of the page, below some hands holding guns and others tearing down barbed wire, reads a message in a thick bold font: “GLORY TO THE / MARTYRS / VICTORY TO THE / RESISTANCE.” Journalism in its printed form transforms from an apathetic business object into an organizing tool, meant not only to inform but also to galvanize.

The 2020 Freep revival took cues from the underground press’s design strategies, most directly from its predecessor of the same name. The War Crimes, too, has drawn from the visual design of the underground. In a June 1969 issue of The Black Panther—the Black Panther Party’s underground bulletin—a full-page illustration shows what looks like figures pressing through a torn-down fence, their once-shackled arms now broken free. In the upper corner reads a message: “To Break The Bonds Of Fascism / We Must Develop A United Front.” Like War Crimes does today in service of the Palestinian cause, The Black Panther utilized the design of its pages as another messaging tactic in service of the Black liberatory struggle.

These alt-papers weren’t and aren’t confined to traditional standards—standards that would likely argue that the use of graphics like the ones published in The Panther or War Crimes leans more activistic than journalistic. But alt-newsmaking is not as concerned with definitive labels as it is with how to craft storytelling in service of something like clarity, solutions, equity, or movement.

Movement journalism and other forms of alt-newsmaking, then, directly challenge the idea of objectivity. While traditional journalism often evaluates the trustworthiness of news by how seemingly objective or dispassionate the newsmaker is from a given issue, newsmaking from this alternative perspective acknowledges that every step of the process requires discretion and decision-making. And every decision is not only colored by biases and subjectivity but also inevitably contributes to the narrative being told. In this way, the medium, format, and design are just as pertinent to the message as the content itself.

Although all different, the network of underground papers in the 1960s and ’70s “had much in common,” according to Geoffrey Rips in his 1981 essay “The Campaign Against the Underground Press.” These papers, according to Rips, “opposed the Vietnam war, advocated sexual and artistic freedoms, and urged critical consciousness towards conventional authority and power relations.” And to do so, the underground employed subversive and nontraditional editorial design: “Poetry, prose, graphic arts, and coverage of folk and rock music thrived in the underground. And these popular arts swelled the rising tides of dissent.”

For The East Village Other, Dick Preston collaged headlines such as “President Urges Marines Kill 162 Starting Monday,” “Narcotics Raid at Buffer Zone,” and “U.S. Marines Gain Stock Exchanges,” in “The Now Yerk Times”—a recreation of The Times’ front page with a rather direct anti-militaristic swing. Others were even more direct: the front page of a 1968 issue of Milwaukee’s Kaleidoscope, for example, sends missiles flying into a drawing of a dense city grid. The weapons are labeled in no uncertain terms: “OPPRESSION,” “VIOLENCE,” “WAR.” The following year, on the cover of Washington Free Press, Uncle Sam injects himself with rocket-shaped syringes, each labeled with a different place—“Cambodia,” “China,” “Russia,” and even “Berkeley.” Rips’s caption for the image in his essay reads: “U.S. imperialism depicted as a national addiction.” Rips explained how the design choices underground papers used to present information “differed greatly from [those] offered by establishment media, which often relied heavily on government and Pentagon sources.” By contrast, he wrote,

many of the underground papers worked closely with daycare centers, free medical clinics and food cooperatives. Others were connected with movements to extend social democracy and with insurgent political parties. […] Both the independent newspapers and organs of political parties encouraged a relationship between reader and publisher that challenged the one-way transmission of news and information characteristic of the establishment press. […] These connections between expression and action looked dangerous to those who feared changes in the status quo. Community participation bent on alternative ways of doing things provoked suspicion. The government perceived in these grass roots relationships “anti-social” threats.

And so, as one might imagine—largely thanks to targeting at the hands of US government agencies—the broad network of the underground press didn’t last for long—though its impact on dissident editorial design surely remains.

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It was around 11:00 p.m. and rainy when I left my apartment on Sunday, March 23. That night, I had set out to walk around the University of Texas at Austin to take photos of security cameras on and around campus. As I expected, there were cameras everywhere: mounted on building exteriors, hidden in the shadowy parts of parking garages, strung up on streetlights, and bolted to towering trees. Within 20 minutes or so, having only walked around a small portion of campus, I already had 20 photos—each of a different camera.

I made these images as a means of rendering a composite illustration that displayed the pervasiveness of surveillance at the hands of the university. The photos also came together as one piece of a larger project I had been working on for the better half of a year—an underground paper of my very own, inspired by the likes of the Underground Press Syndicate and currently operating alt-papers like The New York War Crimes.

The resulting paper, called guerrilla—guerrilla journalism its eponym—explored themes of love, money, and surveillance through essays, poems, photography, and graphics. Within the paper, I was particularly interested in toying with the typical ways in which readers engage with printed ephemera. As others are doing and have done before me, I utilized the visual design of guerrilla to subvert the design aesthetics of mainstream journalism as a means of further amplifying its dissident messaging. For instance, I took those 20 surveillance camera images and cropped each of them into tight squares. I then laid them out across a two-page spread. Some bumped against each other while others were cut into parts by the gutter. Each was unique, and yet, all together, the 20 cameras—just a few of the hundreds placed around campus—formed a uniform glare, the all-knowing stare of an ever-encroaching university and the surveillance state operating behind it.

I was attempting to contribute to the goals of alt-newsmaking and to the historical archive of underground papers—attempting to clarify, to move. The aim was to create a photo-essay that slowed readers down, calling on them to sit with the piece and engage with it in a critical way—as opposed to the short-lived, cyclical ways we so often engage with mainstream media. I’m not sure how successful I was in fostering such a response or achieving those goals. Then again, perhaps some members of the underground felt just as uncertain throughout the 1960s and ’70s.

Quite a few, though, saw and felt their impact firsthand. Jeff Shero Nightbyrd, for instance, began his work within the underground press as part of The Rag, Austin’s alt-newspaper, before moving to New York and launching Rat Subterranean News. In Sean Stewart’s On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. (2011), Shero Nightbyrd discusses the ways in which the design of underground papers not only set them apart from the mainstream but also further reinforced how far behind the mainstream was:

In World War II radio was the chief way of communicating, and FDR used radio well. Then you had television and, pretty soon, the kind of graphic revolution that the underground press made, because the standard press was producing newspapers as if they were made in hot type, which means there were big clackety machines of melted lead, and union guys would sit there at these giant futuristic machines that looked like they were out of that movie Brazil. Clack, clack, clack, and the type would slide down. You would lay out beds of type and that made everything linear. Then when offset came, which was a photographic process that all the underground papers used, you could make anything look like anything. When we started Rag, artists doodled all over the margins and every place. That was visually exciting, and the standard papers not only politically hadn’t caught up with the times, they hadn’t technologically or graphically or in communication caught up with the times.

Shero Nightbyrd’s reflection gets at something more than just nostalgia for ’60s newsmaking and the advances it ushered in. Shifts in the use of technology and choice of design changed not just how underground papers were made but also what they made possible. Offset printing let papers move fast, stay agile, and break away from the stiff, orderly grid of hot-type printing. It let language bleed and images speak, and made room in the margins for illustration, collage, and irreverence. The medium loosened; the message followed.

But even more than that, this shift tapped into a deeper visual politic. Mainstream newspapers prized consistency and clarity, and mostly still do—the same fonts, column widths, and business-focused logic. The underground upended that uniformity on purpose, not out of sloppiness but because dissent needed a different shape. It needed to feel like disruption—jagged, messy, scattered, incomplete, Uncle Sam swelling with invasion in his veins. A delivery system for the content, sure, but also, in many ways, the disruption in and of itself.

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Evan Apodaca’s cyanotypes don’t offer clarity so much as corrosion. The image is there—but only partially, only momentarily, and only after damage. The headlines degrade, the stucco chips. The material remembers, but not perfectly. It forgets on its own timeline. Like the surveillance camera images I placed in the gutter or War Crimes’ red caret marking “WAR,” Apodaca’s cyanotypes remind us that obfuscation is also a kind of legibility.

There’s no full view. Just fragments and interjections—edits that lead us to ask what got pushed out of the frame or off the page. This is the function and value of alt-newsmaking: not to produce a cleaner or more complete image, but to press it against the stucco, rinse it in cold water, and expose it to the sun.