| The study examines the role of the social movement press from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The abolitionist, woman suffrage, gay and lesbian, anti-Vietnam War, and environmental press are examined in detail, as well as the underground GI press during the Vietnam war. It is argued that conventional measures of journalistic success such as circulation, longevity, geographic distribution, and advertising revenue are not reliable indicators of the importance of movement publications. Indeed, such measures may correlate positively or negatively with a journal's success. Rather, the importance of these journals can only be assessed in the context of the particular movements of which each journal was a part: its internal dynamics and strategies, its relation with its immediate adversary, its relation with the state, and its location in the broader culture. As each of these four components is highly dynamic, they create a context of continual change. There is thus no schematic, no "stages theory" of social movements, with which to simplify this analysis.; It is further argued that the era of the social movement press is bounded by technological developments: the invention of the iron press and machine made paper at the outset, and of the Internet at the close, with the invention of offset printing and desktop publishing marking important shifts in between. During this era, the linkages between the social movements and the journals they produced are extremely tight. Movement journals are often the first institutions a movement creates; in some cases they are the only one. Finally, it is suggested that the print-specific characteristics of the social movement press were so central to how social movements constituted themselves, that the profound changes in communications technology currently in motion may well transform not only how social movements communicate, but also what social movements will be. |
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