Street press is a type of publishing, between zines and magazines/newspapers in terms of distribution, content and audience. They are particularly prolific in Australia, although there are also some examples from Europe and North America. Australian street press publish over 400,000 issues each week.
Street press publications are usually available free to the reader. They are distributed by being made available to passers-by at locations such as restaurants, cafes, bars, clubs, live music venues, community centres and record stores.
In order to financially support themselves, street press usually take on more advertisements and sponsorships than other forms of media. Most street press publications are printed on low-quality newspaper stock in order to reduce costs. Some of the bigger publications print their covers and first few pages in colour, a rarer few use glossy paper for their cover. Virtually none of them print more than a couple of pages in colour. The size varies widely, some are printed in broadsheet format, some in tabloid format, and some in magazine-sized format. Non-standard paper sizes are also common, especially in the more obscure publications.
Street press is usually also more professional in appearance and composition than zines, with established business structures and relatively mainstream content. Street press tends to have more mainstream, broad-appeal subject matter than zines, in order to attract sponsors, and increase readership.
Street press publications can cover a wide variety of topics, many are focused upon specific subject mater ot a target audience. Common topics include culture or entertainment topics, such independent or alternative music. Other niche publications might involve political satire, gay and/or lesbian issues, and film.
Community newspapers, delivered to households, usually weekly, which consist primarily of localised news, do not fall into this category. Such newspapers often resemble conventional newspapers focused on local content. In addition, street press usually covers only a specific area of interest, whereas community newspapers might cover a wide variety of topics.
Famous quotes containing the words street and/or press:
“The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins, and pigs and children reveling in the genial Concord dirt; and I should still find my Walden Wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.”
—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 5, Yale University Press (1961)