What if you can't stay home?: Responses to COVID-19 in/by Street Newspapers

• In Event: Student Forum Special Topic Paper Session

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic faced homeless people with acute vulnerabilities unlike almost any other sub-population, and they often experienced negative health outcomes. Like much attention given to homeless and marginalized populations in the past, however, the public's response was too often for, rather than with or by, them. To address long-standing issues surrounding social exclusion, then, street newspapers (SNPs) were established in large numbers beginning in the late 1980s as an economic and discursive intervention upon the media landscape and public spaces. SNPs have been theorized as an alternative strategy for shifting public narratives about homelessness through deliberate media representations as well as assisting homeless individuals in accessing income when they perform the mediating role of newspaper vendor. This analysis engages a standardized dataset of issues (from 2020 and 2021) of three SNPs in large American cities–Street Sense Media in Washington, D.C.; StreetWise in Chicago; and Street Sheet in San Francisco. By performing a frequency analysis of terms related to COVID-19 and homelessness in the selected issues, as well as an inquiry into the vending and other programs of the papers' corresponding organizations, I will illustrate the responses of these three SNPs to the COVID-19 pandemic along two dimensions: their content, or the articles and other information contained in the publications themselves, and their context, or the vending interactions through which individuals come to purchase a given issue. The analysis will reveal how the COVID-19 pandemic destabilized and threatened the status quo of SNPs along both of these lines, but also resulted in the emergence of new operational strategies, including some which exploit technological affordances to meet their objectives. The study will contribute to a growing literature on contemporary street newspapers as they seek to contend with emerging global issues and ever-changing sociopolitical environments.

Author

• Bennett Reinhardt, Fordham University