Despite the proliferation of all-news cable channels, talk radio and the now ubiquitous internet, print persists as the medium where we begin to describe and name public problems, where we undertake the first discussion of issues that shape the daily lives of ordinary people. And, while mainstream newspapers and magazines may participate in this process, feisty independent publications generate the most innovative reporting, analysis and debate. Investigative reporters, academics, policy specialists and other advocates for change do their most original work in these pages. These conversations, all too often ignored or pushed to the margins, can grow to become the cornerstones essential to building new public policies and new ways of thinking. Many of the periodicals in the IPA take it as their mission to move readers beyond conversation to action.
Publications rise, fall or subsist in circumstances that parallel the movements they represent.
Such periodicals serve as forums for debating strategic approaches, for finding common cause among seemingly disparate, often geographically diffuse, constituencies, and, in hard times, for relentless critiques and attempts to resolve factional quarrels. When, in the spring of 1776, Thomas Paine used a self-published pamphlet called Common Sense to argue that rebellion against the crown was a legitimate response to oppressive conditions, he directly challenged the prevailing public sentiment that acts of rebellion were beyond the boundaries of responsible civic behavior. By the summer of 1776, Paine's radical argument had evolved into a new conventional wisdom. In a series of 1862 article in his small circulation Douglass Monthly , Frederick Douglass argued that the best way to disrupt the Confederacy was to take southern blacks out of slavery and put them into Yankee uniforms. Douglass' arguments crystallized new but growing recognition throughout the Union leadership that slavery had become an obstacle to preserving the Union.