The Politics of Reading Street Newspapers

Abstract

In the Summer of 2001, on The Heels of a Four-Year Recession, a Number of Ostensible Want Ads Appeared on Large Billboards in downtown Zurich. “Sought for our sales department: team member with an alcohol problem,” read one of them (fig.1); “Wanted: coworker with a drug career,” read another. Each billboard also featured the slogan “Everyone deserves a second chance.” The billboards were one of the first public campaigns mounted by the editors of Surprise, the Swiss street magazine that has supported the homeless and poor by employing them as vendors since 1998. The magazine's declared aim was to attract salespeople from the community, but the billboards did much more than recruit vendors: they intervened in Zurich's upscale business district and challenged the divide separating the haves from the have-nots.