Homeless Papers Go Global

Gabriel Bissonnette was in his mid-30s, struggling to earn a high school diploma and trying to kick cocaine when the first issue of L'Itinéraire came off the presses.

He'd just found an apartment after spending two years flitting between the streets and homeless shelters of Montreal, and he was looking to change his life. When he learned L'Intinéraire was looking for help, he signed up to work as a vendor of the fledgling street newspaper.

Thirteen years later, Bissonnette continues to distribute one of Canada's street paper success stories, selling to regular clients and passersby at his customary sales point: the corner of St. Denis and Mont-Royal. He pays one dollar for each copy and sells them for two -- the profit is his to keep. There are about 140 vendors like him spread throughout the city.

"When I was begging, people gave me money anyway, but I heard a heck of a lot [of disparaging comments]," Bissonnette recalls. Without the paper, he says, there is a good chance he would still be living on the streets.

Not a charity

L'Itinéraire is part of a growing class of papers that rely on the homeless and the formerly homeless -- as well as those with only a tenuous grip on accommodation -- for distribution. Along with professional staff and freelancers, people of no fixed address also help manage operations and write content.

The Montreal paper got its start in 1994, five years after New York City's now defunct Street News first pioneered the street paper form. It grew out of L'Itinéraire Community Group, a social reinsertion centre formed by a committee of social workers and drug abusers at a public rehabilitation clinic formed in 1990.

The group prefers to focus on what it does well. It lets the rehabilitation clinic take care of the myriad of problems associated with homelessness -- drug and alcohol dependency, mental illness and physical abuse. Aside from one in-house counselor, who mainly helps vendors look for stable housing, the community group does not do much in the way of direct social assistance.

"At L'Itinéraire, nothing comes for free," says Audrey Côté, the paper's editor-in-chief, explaining that the paper is the wrong place to look for handouts.

To Côté, this is an important distinction because the group is committed to fostering a sense of financial responsibility in vendors.

Case in point: the community group's Café sur la rue, an affordably priced restaurant now located under the paper's offices on Ste. Catherine Street. The locale serves as an informal gathering place, and is also where vendors pick up copies of each new issue. But while its clientele is largely poor, the Café is no soup kitchen. Vendors pay for their meals, and the operation doesn't rely on volunteer labour.

"Most vendors are veterans out on the street and know the deal. They know where to go for help. It's up to them really," says Ron Grunberg, the editor of BIGNews, a street paper in New York city that also deliberately declines to offer free social assistance to its homeless employees.

Three-eyed leadership

Originally published once every two months, L'Itinéraire has grown into a bi-weekly that has had to up its selling price to $2 to match rising demand and production costs. Proceeds, however, continue to be split evenly between vendors and the paper.

The paper's continued success has pushed it into a leadership position in the international street paper movement. L'Itinéraire collaborated with the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) last summer to host the 11th annual conference of the International Network of Street Papers, allowing similar publications from around the world to network and share business tactics. Serge Lareault, L'Itinéraire's publisher, is currently the elected head of this international body.

Last year, the Itinéraire group branched into the youth market with a $5 DVD magazine called 3eOeil (3rd Eye), which targets a less print-oriented generation and more multimedia generation.

The quarterly project is riding the momentum that street media in Montreal currently enjoys, and is produced by street youth with professional assistance.

A person behind the paper

According to the philosophy guiding L'Itinéraire and much of the street paper movement, positive interaction with other members of society can be essential in restoring the motivation of individuals whose self-worth has been erased by years of exclusion.

Writing by e-mail, Grunberg had the following to say: "The idea is to create, at point-of-sale, between homeless vendor and member of the public, a rewarding exchange. The public can see the vendor in an honest profession; the vendor can interact with members of society."

Josée-Louise Tremblay sells L'Itinéraire outside the Radio-Canada studio in downtown Montreal and has interviewed a fair number of Quebec celebrities for the paper. For this creative and gregarious artist, it is journalism's outlet for self-expression that re-established her sense of self-confidence several years after a psychologically scarring episode of severe domestic violence.

"There are people in the street whose willpower has been wrecked so thoroughly that they no longer even know they have willpower," explains Tremblay.

Bissonnette admits that his years on the street were a near complete retreat from the responsibility he had known as a teen while taking care of his widowed, ailing mother.

On the other side of the equation, the buyer can also be affected by the exchange in a positive way.

"She's not holding out her hand. She's not asking me for anything. She's selling me something. She paid for it out of her own pocket," says Côté, painting the hypothetical customer's thought process.

Through a positive exchange with a homeless person, the buyer also comes to the realization that he may be more vulnerable to homelessness or poverty -- and more like the individual selling the paper -- than he previously thought. Bissonnette, for example, had been raising his then-girlfriend's children for eight years, and working regular jobs for much longer, when a sudden bout of depression led him to substance abuse and then into the streets 15 years ago.

"Anyone can end up on the street," Côté says. "When you don't accept that idea, then you loathe those who are homeless."

Who's the boss?

In addition to money, dignity and respect, many prize the autonomy that selling L'Itinéraire offers. Vendors are essentially their own bosses.

"In our society, it's not everyone who is able to face the requirements of work," explains Côté.

Despite nearly 20 years of experience in restaurants, Tremblay, for one, feels incapable of working regular hours even years after falling victim to physical abuse. The freedom to set her own hours suits her perfectly.

"My dream is to be autonomous," she explains. "My dream is to have my own company."

Pity in Italy

Daniel Guinea Martin of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, has examined the role of pity in the selling of La Bussola, a street paper in the Italian town of Borgo.

Ideally, the exchange with a member of the public, between equals, should be reaffirming of the vendor's sense of self-worth. If, on the other hand, the buyer is motivated by pity, the transaction becomes more akin to the less dignified act of begging.

Yet the very act of selling a street paper, an object which functions as an "implicit compassion-forming device," according to Martin, signals something about one's economic status.

One vendor at La Bussola, Giuseppe, explicitly acknowledges this fact and brazenly exploits it to evoke sympathy and open up wallets. He simply adds the paper to a series of other signals of his poverty -- religious baubles, cardboard signs, and deliberately ragged clothing.

Others, concerned with maintaining the dignity that a street paper promises, express revulsion at what they see as shameless pandering. Refusing to sacrifice their self-image for money, they adopt a passive selling method to elicit minimal pity.

Compassion in Montreal

Vendors of L'Itinéraire tend to adopt rather dignified selling approaches. This is a result of the paper's mandate -- to restore individuals' confidence.

What actually moves the public to buy L'Itinéraire, however, is more ambiguous. Though most vendors feel that interest in the paper's content has increased over the years along with production values, compassion and support for the paper's mission undoubtedly continue to generate much of its business.

"It's not for [the celebrity on the cover] that I'm buying the paper, it's for you," is a comment Bissonnette often hears.

Entertain or empower?

L'Itinéraire draws attention to homeless issues in its coverage and advocates for change through its editorials. But striking a balance between advocating for change and simultaneously attracting a broad-based clientele is not an easy endeavour. Many editors feel that an overly narrow focus on issues of homelessness and poverty, especially if expressed in ideological terms, can be bad for business.

"From the outset, we knew that The Big Issue could not just be about homelessness. We had to make sure that people would want to read the paper and not get bored by reading about the same thing," wrote Sinead Hanks and Tessa Swithinbank, of London's The Big Issue, in a 1997 article in the scholarly journal Environment and Urbanization.

As sales must be maintained to support the vendors, many papers -- including L'Itinéraire -- have gradually shifted toward coverage of general interest matters in recent years.

The Big Issue represents the extreme of this spectrum among street papers. It's a professionally produced, high-gloss entertainment and lifestyle magazine that depends on professional journalists to pen content. Only very limited homelessness-related material finds its way into this U.K. paper and sister versions in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

To its credit, The Big Issue provides the paper's homeless vendors with many services that other publications, including L'Itinéraire, cannot afford. Among these are outreach teams to promote effective selling, a variety of training and education workshops, and dependency counselling.

At the other end of the spectrum sit papers like Borgo's La Bussola. Often managed by one or a few individuals, they are produced in large part by people living on the street. Content has more to do with politics and empowerment than entertainment, but budgets are tiny, the pages less shiny, and circulation accordingly limited.

L'Itinéraire strikes a balance. It has become a generally interesting and bigger paper than most in terms of circulation and recognition, but continues to tackle social issues.

Conservative ethos

Though one could expect street newspapers to be inherently left-leaning, the majority of papers contacted claim to be centrist or even wholly apolitical. The original Street News in New York, in fact, was very much a right-wing, libertarian publication that celebrated the acceptance of individual responsibility by the homeless.

"We're not as left-wing as we used to be, but we've been thinking of getting back to our roots. Personally, I'd like it if we were more hard-hitting," says Bissonnette, who serves as the vendors' representative and sits on the paper's administrative council.

While the paper's leftist slant is most clearly discernible in the editorials, vendors are also supportive of the paper's progressive voice.

"We have the customers, so now's the time."

That many street publications have relatively broad support -- from individuals, businesses, and government -- may lie partly in the fact that the idea of street people working hard for themselves in an environment where nothing is given for free is consistent with the conservative ethos.

In the case of L'Itinéraire, subsidies at all governmental levels and private donations make up nearly half the paper's operating budget. Advertising and sales, or self-generated revenue, account for the rest.

A concrete good

While the work of front line charity organizations like shelters and soup kitchens remains vital, the street paper's main achievement is getting people off the street, often for good.

"I think we're the group who has helped the most people, concretely," affirms Bissonnette.

He says that since the paper's inception, about 500 vendors have managed to use the newspaper as a starting point to change their lives for the better. After a long struggle with poverty and homelessness, Bissonnette himself is now comfortably settled.

Still, street papers are a limited tool when it comes to ending homelessness. With an estimated 15,000 people without a fixed residence in Montreal, the current number of L'Itinéraire's vendors represents less than one per cent of those to whom the job might of benefit. With money, dignity and autonomy at stake, why aren't more people selling?

"There are those who come, who try it out, and they realize that it takes an hour to sell five [papers]," explains Pierre Goupil, a vendor with a couple years of experience. "It takes a lot of patience."

"I'm no more interested than the next guy in standing on the corner to make four dollars in an hour," continues Goupil, who emphasizes that Montreal's bad weather can be a real sales killer.

It's generally acknowledged that street paper vendors, in Montreal and abroad, actually make less money than they would from begging. L'Itinéraire's vendors, in particular, get practically the lowest cut around, keeping only half of the paper's sale price. At many other papers, vendors are entitled to about two-thirds or more of the sale price. La Bussola vendors are encouraged to negotiate prices directly with the public.

However unfortunate, there's no guarantee the situation would be better if selling became more lucrative. Many, like Giuseppe in Borgo, might take up the job solely for the money, ignoring the paper's goals of renewed dignity and social involvement. L'Itinéraire's reputation -- and its most sincere vendors -- would accordingly suffer.

For many, it's clear that selling street papers is about a whole lot more than pocket change. It's about confidence and motivation, both of which depend on more than money.

As Bissonnette puts it, "sometimes a little pat on the back is worth a whole lot more than a toonie."

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