New York Times

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Read all about it: Chelsea Potter distributed the first issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal near Zuccotti Park Saturday morning.
Just before noon, Chelsea Potter stood on the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street holding a sheaf of newspapers and offering them to passers-by.

“Excuse me,” she said to a man in a tan raincoat. “Would you like a copy of The Occupied Wall Street Journal?”

The man accepted the paper without breaking stride then looked at it as he continued walking.

Over the last two weeks, as people participating in a protest called Occupy Wall Street have called attention to what they say are inequities in the economic system, the ways in which news organizations have covered the protests have been a subject of hot debate.

Some protesters have wished aloud for reporting more in line with their own conception of themselves.

Now, they have their own newspaper. It debuted on Saturday with a print run of 50,000, after two independent journalists in New York started a campaign using the online fund-raising platform Kickstarter.

“This movement has sometimes been misrepresented,” said Arun Gupta, 46, one of the two primary organizers of the project. “This paper is for the general public to let them know what is going on here.”

The four-page broadsheet includes a story by Mr. Gupta headlined “The Revolution Begins at Home,” an essay by the former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges urging people to participate in the protests, and a “Declaration of the Occupation” approved at a meeting of protesters on Sept. 29.

“There are no excuses left,” Mr. Hedges writes in a piece reprinted from the site Truthdig, where has a regular column.

Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.
Mr. Gupta, and the other main organizer, Jed Brandt, 38, both have experience working on the Indypendent, a left-leaning paper that publishes about 16 issues a year and that Mr. Gupta co-founded 11 years ago.

The two men opened an account on Kickstarter on Thursday, Mr. Brandt said, describing the paper as a public art project. Within eight hours, he said, they had raised more than $12,000.

The papers were printed Friday night in Long Island City, Queens, and delivered to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, where protesters have been camping, on Saturday morning.

There, the papers made their way to people like Ms. Potter, 20, from Augusta, Ga., who said that she had come to New York to join to protests because she believes that corporations have all but taken over government.

“We need a different world,” she said.

Papers were distributed to protesters and nonprotesters. Somebody tucked a copy into the arm of J. Seward Johnson’s “Double Check,” a life sized bronze statue of a businessman looking into a briefcase that sits on a granite bench in the park.

One of the nonprotesters who accepted a paper was Veronica Cook, 19, from Groton, Conn., who was visiting New York with her husband, Steven Cook, who is in the Navy.

Ms. Cook said that she did not know much about the protesters or their objectives, but said she would take a look at the paper she had been handed.

“At least they are not just shouting in a corner,” she said. “Making a newspaper is a good way to try to get a message out.”
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Cultural Affairs, Government & Politics, Public Spaces, Occupy Wall Street, Wall Street protests