Los Angeles Free Press

Los Angeles Free Press

LA Free Press (Dec. 15-22, 1967)
Type	Newspaper
Format	alternative weekly
Founder(s)	Art Kunkin
Founded	May 23, 1964
Ceased publication	April 3, 1974
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California

The Los Angeles Free Press (1964–1978; new series 2005–ongoing), also called “the Freep”, was among the most widely distributed underground newspapers of the 1960s. It is often cited as the first such newspaper. The Free Press was edited and published weekly, for most of its existence, by Art Kunkin, who, at the time of its founding, was a 36-year-old unemployed tool-and-die worker and former organizer for the Socialist Workers Party, where he had served as business manager of the SWP paper, The Militant.

The Free Press initially appeared as a one-shot 8-page tabloid, dated May 23, 1964, sold at the annual Los Angeles Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market, a fund-raising event for listener-sponsored KPFK radio. This first issue was entitled The Faire Free Press, with the logo "Los Angeles Free Press" appearing on an inside page, and a coupon soliciting subscribers. Five thousand copies were printed, of which 1200 sold at a price of 25 cents. While the outside pages were a spoof of the fair's Renaissance theme featuring cute stories like one about a "ban the crossbow" demonstration, the inside contained legitimate underground community news and reviews. After the fair was over Kunkin circulated a brochure to potential investors and found enough backing to start putting out the paper on a regular weekly basis in July 1964.

The Free Press was produced mostly by unpaid volunteers. In the beginning many of them were the same people who volunteered at KPFK, where Kunkin had his own political commentary radio show. It operated for its first two years out of free office space in the basement of a Sunset Boulevard coffeehouse called The Fifth Estate, which was an informal headquarters for the teenyboppers who gathered and rioted on the Sunset Strip in the mid-1960s.Harlan Ellison and Lawrence Lipton were the first regular columnists, articles by the former collected in The Glass Teat. The paper grew slowly at first and in Oct. 1966 Kunkin informed a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that the paper had 9000 readers and was operating on a shoestring. "I wanted to do a weekly in Los Angeles that would be like the Village Voice in New York," Kunkin told the Times.