By Nate Leskovic
ACJ Treasurer

Boston’s rival street papers have sheathed their blades and left the cutthroat journalism world behind with a recently announced plan to merge.

Spare Change News and Whats Up Magazine, traditionally sold on the streets by homeless vendors, are hammering out details that would tuck the culture-centered Whats Up inside the more hard-news Spare Change as a separate section.

“To get this plan moving will benefit everyone—readers, staff and vendors,” says Spare Change Executive Director Emily Johnson. “We’ll be working with a lot more writers and I think it will make it a lot more appealing.”

Street papers—which are published around the world—aim to increase awareness of homelessness, as well as provide an income for those living the lifestyle. Content frequently includes all types of commentary, artsy pieces and social justice stories written by prisoners, street people and volunteers.

The concept of merging Spare Change and Whats Up formed after a 2006 international street paper convention in Montreal. As a speaker went on about the counter productivity of competition between papers with similar missions, both Johnson and Whats Up Program Director Kathy Ferguson listened and agreed.

The two publication’s staffs soon discussed collaboration and after Whats Up’s parent organization, Haley House, decided to cut off funding, the project became necessary.

By combining resources, the staff hopes to improve content.

“We want to be seen as a legitimate news source and not as a pity paper,” says Johnson. “We need to change the way we’re perceived in the public.”

Ferguson says printing a better product and increasing sales will also boost income for vendors.
“It’s really tough to sell,” she says. “It’s cold sometime, people don’t have change, and they’re always listening to their iPods,”

Spare Change was started in 1992 by a group of homeless people and eventually became a nonprofit. It prints every two weeks.

Whats Up, which already printed its last issue, was bi-monthy. It launched in 1997 and was picked up in 1999 by Roxbury’s Haley House, a charitable organization that runs a soup kitchen and provides job training to former prisoners among other activities.

Ferguson says the split was amicable.

“I just felt bad about being in the Haley House,” she says. “We weren’t self-sustaining. We were just in their space and they weren’t really helping us.”

Johnson says she wants to ramp-up circulation and possibly go weekly. Spare Change distributes around 7,000 copies, while Whats Up printed 4,000.

The papers rely mainly on grants and donations, but there is hope advertising will pick up after reorganization.

“It’s hard to get ads in a street paper,” says Johnson. “There’s a stigma. They think, ‘why would we advertise to homeless people?’”

However, the connection to the concrete gives the genre its advantage.

“It attracts a volunteer base,” Ferguson says. “If we were like any other lit mag we would have fallen apart long ago.”

“The voices from the street reflect a perspective that most of our readers will never have,” adds Johnson.