Israel Bayer fell in love with news while working graveyard shifts at 7-Eleven. Now he's running one of the most influential street newspapers in the country.

Street Roots, Portland’s street newspaper, has a curious tagline: For those who cannot afford free speech.

Does it refer to the homeless people who sell the papers? Or to the gritty content of the paper itself? Speak with its executive director, Israel Bayer, and you'll realize that it’s both…and neither.

Bayer’s small paper—he describes it as a “small train that carries a heavy load”—does more than put a few stray dollars in the pockets of its homeless salespeople. Rather, under his guidance, Street Roots has been slowly but surely breaking major stories. Major stories that have been making real impacts.

Journalism, anyone will agree, is at an all-time low. Yellow Journalism, once an extreme tactic, has become the norm. Fake news abounds. Corruption is rampant, and only a handful of wealthy individuals control the information being distributed to local constituencies nationwide. It’s not that the homeless can’t afford free speech, it’s that none of us can.

The tagline, as strange as it may sound, is a manifesto for a new media regime. The encapsulation of an intriguing idea, that real, local, issue-based journalism may have found its last stand—or its new beginning—on the far flung, forgotten fringe of news that is the street newspaper.

How did you get into this?

I grew up in middle industrial America, Alton, Illinois, a Mississippi River town. I was a lower income individual with a single mom. The community didn't have a lot of opportunity for a fellow like me, and I was basically going nowhere fast. So I got out of town, quit high school and spent several years traveling with the Dead, and getting into trouble.

I was having a lot of fun exploring things, but not a whole lot of opportunity and no ability to see really any future for myself. I moved to Denver on a whim with a friend, and ended up working at a 7-Eleven convenience store, graveyard shifts. I read the magazines in the store all night. I like to say that I started at MAD Magazine and ended up at The New Yorker. Something triggered. I've always loved history and reading, and I've always been into current affairs, but I think it dawned on me that, "Holy shit. I can tell peoples’ stories?? Okay, so how do I do this?"

What did you do next?

Next began another journey throughout my 20s to basically learn the art of journalism. I was a poor kid, I didn't go to college, so I have no formal education. I started stringing for some small newspapers, I volunteered with groups, I basically tried to be a sponge and to marry journalism into my life. Along with that came the discovery of social activism. I was arrested at the WTO protest in Seattle and spent a week in King County Jail.

You were protesting?

I was protesting, but really I was a part of the festive environment. I wanted to save the world, I was young and naïve, but I believe in that period I began to understand the economics of where I came from. We spent seven days in King County Jail during that protest, and there was a rabbi who organized teach-ins every half an hour in the whole cell block. Whatever you knew, how to steal a car, how to make a rocket, whatever it was. Then at night when the lights went out, he told the history of the Jewish people and the Jewish struggle.

Are you Jewish?

No, I'm not, despite the name. But the rabbi had this crazy impact on me, so I walked out of that jail like, "Holy shit. My whole world's changed." I'd always felt lost and like I was just going to be another statistic. I found the street newspaper movement, and then basically fell in love.

What were the beginnings of Street Roots like?

You had poetry, you had screech, you had street art, the design was horrible. It just looked like what people would expect from a homeless newspaper. Basically, the folks selling the newspaper came to us and said, "Look, we love this idea of being able to go out and gather an income, but I hope you know the people are purchasing the newspaper and throwing it in the trash." They wanted to change the way the newspaper was run. So they brought me in to take a different tack. I got the designer who designed the local daily paper here, the Oregonian. He put together a design template for us that was dynamite.

At that time, I think we had three staff. It was bare bones. We just continued to work at it, work at it, and over time started to be able to build capacity, add staff, but the key focus was away from a homeless newspaper into a community social justice newspaper. We stopped covering specifically homelessness and housing, because it felt like we were just beating people over the head with it. You're a person who cares, but you don't want to be berated to feel guilty.

What do you see as the major difference between a street newspaper and a regular newspaper in terms of content?

We're not a tabloid, we don't care who you're having an affair with, we don't care if you're snorting cocaine on Friday night, we don't care about your personal life so much as we care about the fabric of the community and making it a better place for everybody. That's not just the poor homeless, but that's all of us.

"We don't care who you're having an affair with, we don't care if you're snorting cocaine on Friday night, we don't care about your personal life so much as we care about the fabric of the community."

Which stories of yours have had the biggest impacts?

Well, we did a big investigative report on the archdiocese in the Catholic community who was de-funding grassroots poverty organizations, including Street Roots, that had any kind of affiliation with Planned Parenthood. Then, there were 300 people going to be evicted by a housing authority in rural Oregon because of federal logistics, and our managing editor Joanne Zuhl shined a spotlight on that and saved those 300 people from becoming homeless. Then last year our investigative reporter Emily Green did a three-part series where we spent time with forest workers in these horrible, crazy working conditions. We’re hoping the series leads to legislative action this up-and-coming session.