The early
Columbus Free Press was the culmination of a string of attempts to launch an antiwar underground newspaper in Columbus, which included the
Free University Cosmic Cosmic,
Gregory,
The People Yes,
Renaissance, and
Purple Berries. None of these efforts had survived for more than six months. The
Free Press (still alive in greatly altered form in its fiftieth year) was founded by a large cast of volunteers including Steve Abbott, Bill and Sandi Quimby, Paul Ricardo, Cheryl Betz, John Hunt, and Roger Doyle, with many others; some of the early founders were on the staff of the
Ohio State University library. The first issue, dated Oct. 21, 1970, was printed in a run of 2,000 copies and sold for fifteen cents. Initially the
Columbus Free Press was an eclectic liberal-pacifist paper, less militant than
Purple Berries, which had been founded in the aftermath of the
Kent State Massacre and an 18-day student strike at Ohio State. After
Purple Berries published its last issue in December some of its staff joined the
Free Press. In the early days the paper's distribution center, drop-off point and unofficial hangout was a
High Street headshop called Tradewinds; and after several members of the staff were arrested in May 1972 and the regular office seemed unsafe the paper was produced for a time in the basement of Tradewinds. The
Free Press survived the ending of the Vietnam War, which deprived many underground papers of their ''raison d'être'', and in 1974 it raised its print run from 2,000 to 10,000 copies and became an advertiser-supported free giveaway newspaper, following a model increasingly adopted by many other alternative papers around the country at that time. At this time the paper's politics continued to drift farther to the left. Some staffers and former staff were involved with the
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the above-ground support group for the
Weatherman Underground, and half the staff formed a Marxist caucus within the paper. As a result of an
FOIA request it was discovered years later that the FBI had an informant inside the core staff at this time filing regular reports. During this period much of the
Free Press content was reprinted from sources like
The Guardian. The staff dwindled to eight active members and in 1977, facing declining readership and staff burnout, the Marxist caucus gave up the ghost and published what was announced as the paper's "final issue." Immediately the former non-Marxist faction on the defunct paper regrouped and relaunched the paper under their own control, bringing back some ex-staffers who had drifted away over the years. At this time the
Free Press embraced the "
alternative weekly" formula, "no longer on the barricades but supportive of those who still were," in the words of Steve Abbott, with more focus on local news,
alternative culture and lifestyles. In 1984, after ten years of free distribution, the
Free Press started charging again and became a 50-cent monthly. In 1987 the editors, hearing that a local community activist named Duane Jager was talking about starting a paper of his own, contacted him and offered to give him the paper. Jager took over as the paper's new publisher and created a non-profit entity, the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, to own the paper.
John Quigley stayed on as senior editor and
Harvey Wasserman, a former member of the
Liberation News Service collective who had moved to Columbus, joined the paper as a regular columnist, eventually becoming senior editor.
Mary Jo Kilroy, one of the editors of the paper during these years, later served in Congress, representing Columbus in a seat formerly held by a Republican. In 1993
Bob Fitrakis, a political science Ph.D., attorney and founding member and national committee member of the
Democratic Socialists of America, became editor of the paper and executive director of the sponsoring CICJ, posts he continues to hold to the present day (2014). ==Present==