Liberation News Service - History

History

Liberation News Service was co-founded in the summer of 1967 by Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom after the two of them were separated from the United States Student Press Association.

A split in the news collective, then based in New York City (recently relocated from Washington, D.C.), saw Bloom set up a short-lived competing operation in Montague, Massachusetts.

LNS garnered support from well-known journalists and activists, as documented in a letter signed by I.F. Stone, Jack Newfield, Nat Hentoff, and William M. Kunstler published in the New York Review of Books. In an appeal for funds, the signers praised the investigative work of LNS, and noted it had "grown from a mimeoed sheet distributed to ten newspapers to a printed 20-page packet of articles and graphics mailed to nearly 800 subscribers twice a week

Starting in 1968, for several years, LNS was produced from Morningside Heights in Manhattan, initially from a store front, and later from the basement of an apartment building which at one time had been a food store.

In an essay published by LNS on March 1, 1969, Thorne Dreyer and Victoria Smith wrote that the news service "was an attempt at a new kind of journalism -- developing a more personalistic style of reporting, questioning bourgeois conceptions of 'objectivity' and reevaluating established notions about the nature of news..." They pointed out that LNS "provided coverage of events to which most papers would have otherwise had no access, and... put these events into a context, helping new papers in their attempts to develop a political analysis... In many places, where few radicals exist and journalistic experience is lacking, papers have been made possible primarily because LNS copy has been available to supplement scarce local material."

Reduced to serving only 150 newspapers, the LNS collective decided to close operations in August 1981. LNS records are archived variously in the Contemporary Culture Collection of Temple University Libraries, the Archive of Social Change of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library, and the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College; its photographs are archived at New York University's Tamiment Library.