When the Cambridge Phoenix was sold in 1972, its staff lost their jobs and the name of their newspaper. They kept writing. Within days, they had started The Real Paper.
The name did some of the arguing for them. Readers could buy a publication carrying the Phoenix name, or they could follow much of its former staff to a different paper. For a while, Boston had both. The dispute produced a Cambridge-based alternative weekly that covered politics, music and the arts until 1981, and published one of the most repeated sentences in rock criticism.
The Real Paper began outside a locked office
The trouble started before the sale. Phoenix owner Richard Missner fired editor Harper Barnes in May 1972, prompting staff to organize a union and threaten a strike. The ensuing fight included confrontations over the production of the paper itself.
A settlement did not last long. That July, Missner sold the Phoenix name, subscription list and classified advertising to Stephen Mindich, owner of Boston After Dark. The Harvard Crimson’s reporting that September described staff being given three hours to leave.
Two days after the sale, displaced employees met in the hallway outside their locked offices and decided to keep publishing. They also agreed to hold off accepting other jobs. It was a practical expression of solidarity: a newspaper needs enough people left in the room to make the next issue.
The first Real Paper was financed through advertising and an anonymous $200 contribution, according to the Crimson. Some employees initially worked without pay. By September, its publisher reported that most of the staff were being paid, while the new publication was still trying to establish its identity with readers.
A newsroom owned by its employees
The new operation gave employees equal shares and elected its leadership. Northeastern’s archive of The Real Paper records Paul Solman’s election as its first editor and dates the first issue to August 2, 1972.
Solman later became known for explaining economics on PBS. His PBS biography traces a career that included Boston After Dark before The Real Paper, followed by feature writing, investigative reporting and television. The competing weeklies were also training grounds for writers whose work would reach much larger audiences.
Laura Shapiro was a Real Paper columnist before spending sixteen years at Newsweek, where she covered food, women’s issues and the arts. Her own account of that career places the local paper before the books and national magazine work that followed.
The weekly’s interests went beyond reviewing whatever was onstage. Northeastern describes coverage of counterculture and left-of-center politics alongside Greater Boston’s music and arts. The mix gave readers a publication in which a political argument and an opinionated music column could share the same issue.
The Springsteen review that outlived the paper
On May 9, 1974, Bruce Springsteen performed at the Harvard Square Theatre. Photographer Barry Schneier, who photographed the concert, identifies that date in his record of the performance. Real Paper critic Jon Landau was there too.
Landau’s review appeared on May 22. It included the line “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” In the published passage, Landau describes being so caught up in the show that he had been beating time on his own thighs.
That is a more revealing image than the famous sentence by itself: a critic responding physically to a performance, then trying to explain why it mattered. Landau later became Springsteen’s longtime manager.
The ownership experiment ended first
The employee collective did not survive for the paper’s entire run. Staff divisions led to its sale in 1975 to Ralph I. Fine, David Rockefeller Jr. and William Weld.
The Real Paper continued until financial trouble brought another sale in June 1981. The buyer was Stephen Mindich, whose purchase of the Cambridge Phoenix had set the whole undertaking in motion nine years earlier.
Northeastern preserves issues alongside meeting minutes, financial statements, union records and letters. The published pages show what the staff made. The paperwork records how hard they worked to keep making it.
