“It’s a way back into society”: How street papers navigate a post-print world
If you live in the UK, you’ve likely come across a Big Issue vendor in their bright red tabard. Founded in 1991, the Big Issue is one of the most successful street papers in the world, with a circulation of over 40,000 copies per week and more than 3,000 active vendors. It regularly punches above its weight for big-name interviews, from Paul McCartney and the Dalai Lama to the Spice Girls. You might even have seen Prince William selling it on the street.
The Big Issue, and other similar street papers, are magazines sold in-person, on the street, by people experiencing homelessness or poverty. Vendors buy copies at a discount from the organisations, sell them on the street, and keep the profit. It’s a way to make a basic income for people who might have no other options.
The model has spread around the world, from New York City and London to Rio de Janeiro. According to the International Network of Street papers, there are now more than 90 active street papers across 35 countries. But as the world moves ever away from print news, can street papers still support the people they were built for?
To answer this question, I spoke with staff at three street papers: the Big Issue in the UK, Mi Valedor in Mexico City, and Traços in Brazil. I also spent time with five Big Issue vendors on their pitches across central London to know how the model has worked for them.
1. On the pitch with the 'Big Issue'
The main purpose of street papers is to put cash directly in the hands of people in need.
In the UK, part of what makes the model possible is a legal quirk which states that newspapers can be sold on the street without any kind of trading license. This means there are no barriers to entry for people looking to sell street papers. A person in need can collect copies and begin selling on the same day.
At the Big Issue, vendors buy copies of the magazine for £2.50 and sell them for £5.00 – they’re given five free copies to help them get started.
To see how the model works in practice, I went to London to speak with five vendors on their regular pitches around the city centre. I started with a basic question: How much do you actually make in a day?
The vendors I spoke to generally agreed that making £50.00 is a very good day. That can mean selling around 20 copies, but it can be less than that if people ‘tip’, for instance giving £10.00 for a copy and telling the vendor to keep the change.
They’re often out for about six hours or so, which comes out to about £8.00 an hour, again, on a very good day. It’s not uncommon to go a full day without breaking even.
Is that enough?
“Well, I get by,” says George Anderson, a vendor in the posh neighbourhood of Marylebone. He started selling the Big Issue after finding himself on the street when his work dried up and his housing fell through when the relative he was living with passed away.
“I’ve got a room in a hostel now, which I manage to pay for. I don’t have to claim any benefits, so I'm pleased with that,” says Anderson, who’s working to get into more permanent accommodation and finding additional sources of income. “It’s a bit unpredictable. You have two or three rainy days, and you don't make anything.”
Another vendor, Andre Rostant, whose pitch is on touristy Carnaby Street, explains that the first few weeks of selling are especially tricky:
“There is definitely a rate of attrition at the beginning,” he told me. “I try to tell new vendors: don't take it personally, persist. A lot of first-time vendors have lost a huge degree of self-esteem because of their experiences, so it’s very important to boost people’s confidence at the start.”
He started selling the magazine 13 years ago, and now works part-time for the Big Issue as a support worker.
“I see partly what I do [as a support worker] as saving people from that initial hurdle. If you persist in the same pitches at the same time, you will eventually become recognisable and build your base of regular customers.”
The vendors also told me about their strategies for selling copies. “I stand in the middle of the pavement, work out which way most people are coming, face in that direction, and start talking to people,” Rostant said. “I’m a social creature and that helps with selling.”
M., a soft-spoken vendor who preferred to remain anonymous, has the opposite strategy:
“Where I sell, it’s the same people who walk past four times a day on their way to and from work,” he explains from his pitch near Harley Street. “If I was shouting ‘BIG ISSUE, BIG ISSUE’ at them four times a day, eventually they would start taking a different route. Whereas if I am just standing here, holding up the magazine every day, they start to recognise me and, after a while, a few of them will start buying a weekly copy.”
2. It’s not just about cash
Spending time with the vendors also revealed some of the limits of the street paper model. These organisations have to balance mission with commercial realities, and that has produced disagreements about pay and priorities for some.
A few vendors mentioned the problem of precarity. The flexibility of the model means there’s no sick pay or holiday pay – if you don't work for a few days, you might not have enough left to buy new copies the next time around.
I also heard from a few distributors who serve as ‘middle men’ between production offices and vendors by setting up distribution points across London. “We get 25p commission on each copy we sell to vendors,” one of them tells me, also preferring to stay anonymous. “But we haven’t had a raise in 10 years, even though the cover price has gone up.”
This person was also frustrated about a job posting he’d seen of the Big Issue hiring a finance manager with a six-figure salary. “The whole thing is supposed to be about the vendors, right?,” he says. “So why are the guys at the top being paid that much money?”
Asked about this, a spokesperson for the Big Issue said that salaries are set “in line with other comparable not-for-profit organisations so we can attract and retain the talent needed to ensure we make the maximum impact for the people we exist to support.”
Despite these frustrations, every vendor I spoke with stressed that selling the magazine had been a lifeline at a time where they didn't have any other options. They described the income as important, but all of them talked about wider, less tangible benefits too. “It gives you a foot in society,” said Rostant.
“If you are selling the Big Issue, your name is registered, we can refer you to people who can help. It’s a way back into society. John Bird [the founder of the Big Issue] had this idea that you could work your way out of poverty. Of course that is nonsense because if you look around the world, the people working the hardest are always the poorest. So it's not a question of being able to work your way out of poverty. It’s more about alleviating lots of the problems associated with poverty,” he says, citing isolation, loneliness, and crime. “Selling the magazine can help enormously with that.”
The Big Issue also offers wider support alongside its magazine-employment model. Vendors can access practical help with housing, benefits, and employment training. One distributor told me about how he’d borrowed a suit from the organisation for a job interview. He was also looking into financial support provided by the organisation for getting a certificate to teach English to immigrants.
3. From London to Latin America
Since its founding in the 1990s, the Big Issue has become the template for dozens of similar publications around the world.
One of those outlets is Mi Valedor in Mexico City, founded by Maria Portilla after seeing the Big Issue while living in London. Like its British counterpart, it is produced by professional journalists and sold on the street by people experiencing homelessness or poverty. Its editorial focus is on culture in Mexico City, with each bi-monthly issue featuring full-colour photography, literature, and archives from the city.
“Mi Valedor was directly inspired by the Big Issue,” Portilla told me. “Before moving back from London, I went to the magazine’s head office in Glasgow to see how it worked and learn from them.”
Similarly to the Big Issue, vendors buy the magazine at $8 MXN, and sell it for $50 MXN, keeping $42 MXN in profits (around £1.80 GBP). They also have a community centre for their vendors which offers everything from health check-ups to creative workshops.
“A lot of our vendors make enough to rent a room,” she said. “Half of them are paying for a room through their income from their magazine sales.” The magazine sells about 2,000 copies per month, with 74 active vendors.
Like Rostant, Portilla said that while ‘working your way out of poverty’ is the ‘best case scenario’, she is realistic that street papers are not a magic bullet. But she also believes that the magazine offers something more fundamental.
“A street paper is firstly an object that allows those living in the streets to have an interaction with other people,” she said. “It’s a link between worlds. That is the most important thing that a street newspaper has [to offer]. It creates an interaction between two people from different backgrounds who wouldn’t necessarily speak to each other otherwise.”
I also spoke with the editorial team at Traços, a regional street paper in Brazil with teams in Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, and Espírito Santo. Founded in 2015, it focuses on the arts across each of the three cities, selling around 9,000 copies per issue. CEO Juliana Valentim told me it was modelled off of the Argentinian street paper Hecho, which was itself inspired by the Big Issue.
“It’s about much more than just the money,” said Valentim. “For instance, one of our vendors is in a difficult health situation and has been in hospital for many days now. People from our team at Traços are going there to see her and we are the only visitors. Traços can give her a sense that she's not alone, that she belongs somewhere.”
4. The value of the journalism
So what about the magazines themselves? The journalism is often award-winning. The Big Issue received the Society of Editors’ Outstanding Achievement in Journalism Award in 2024 and its investigations have been nominated for the prestigious Paul Foot Award. Traços received the 2024 Prêmio Barbosa Sobrinho de Jornalismo in Brazil.
Despite this, research shows that most people buy street papers primarily because they want to support the vendors, more than for the journalism itself. Traços ran its own study and reached a similar conclusion.
This isn’t necessarily a problem for the organisations. “We exist to help our vendors, so if people are primarily buying our magazine for that too, rather than for the journalism, that's okay with us,” said Valentim. But it does raise the question: If readers are primarily buying the social mission, does the journalism matter? Does it matter what they publish?
I would say it does. First, the credibility of the employment model for the vendors depends on producing a publication people actually want to read, even if many customers initially buy it because they want to support the vendor. It legitimises the interaction by offering something of value to exchange besides charity. Without a genuine, high-quality product to trade, the project risks feeling like a gimmick.
The editorial teams at the three magazines featured here also told me how the reporting itself can help to change pre-conceptions people have about homelessness. Most street papers include some reporting about the issues faced by their vendors, and many feature interviews or articles written by people experiencing homelessness themselves.
“I always advocate for people to not just purchase the magazine, but to actually read it as well,” said Mike Findlay-Agnew, Chief Executive of the International Network of Street Papers in Glasgow. “There's a lot of stigmatising language concerning homelessness. By consuming street papers and understanding the real, lived experience of people going through these issues, we can start to see subtle changes in attitudes over time.”
5. Can street papers survive?
The print product is at the core of the street papers’ value proposition. It’s how the whole model works. You can’t just ‘go digital”.
Still, some have adapted anyway. The Big Issue, for instance, has built up its social media presence to build brand awareness among younger audiences, through a mixture of covers, vertical videos and vendor profiles. It has also made room for a more traditional subscription model, allowing people to support specific vendors through an annual subscription, with proceeds going directly into their personal bank accounts.
“Street papers are quite an urban concept,” Findlay-Agnew said. “We tend to be in bigger towns and cities across the world. But in more rural areas, a subscription is a way for people to still feel connected to street papers and be able to consume the content.”
There was also a tricky transition period as society moved away from cash in the wake of the pandemic. All three papers I spoke to have gradually kitted out their vendors with ways to accept card payments.
The other challenge is one familiar to publishers everywhere: the rising cost of producing print. Most street papers rely on more than just their magazine sales to sustain themselves, supplementing their sales revenue with government grants, donations, ads, and sponsorships.
Traços, for example, makes almost no money on the sale of the magazine – it is largely funded through government grants. Mi Valedor also relies heavily on grants, sponsorships, and ad revenue. But others, like the Big Issue, still depend partly on sales to pay for the magazine’s production. This is part of the reason why the organisation stresses the importance of people actually taking a copy of the magazine when they buy from a vendor.
“There is a problem with people just giving vendors money and not taking the magazine,” says Brontë Schiltz, Northern Correspondent at the Big Issue. “If vendors aren’t selling their magazines, they buy fewer from us, and that’s a real problem because street papers have high overheads. We rely economically on selling magazines to vendors.”
“If we [the vendors] didn't pay that £2.50 to buy the mag, there wouldn’t be a Big Issue at all,” Anderson, the vendor in Marylebone, told me. “So I do try and encourage people to take the magazine as well.”
Apart from the basic economics of it, there is also a broader ethos around taking the product: “You wouldn’t go into a shop and just give the shop owner some money,” says Schiltz. “When people give the vendor money but don’t take the magazine, it shows they aren’t necessarily seeing them as professionals, which they are.”
“I like when people take the mag,” says Anderson. “I like to feel as though I’m selling a product, rather than begging,” - though he (and other vendors) tell me some people heckle them to “get a real job” while they’re on their pitch.
6. Does the model still work?
In researching for this piece, I heard some criticism that street papers don’t ‘work’ as a way to get people out of poverty, as vendors sometimes end up selling them for years or decades.
“That’s nonsense,” Rostant said in response to this. “Some people are not capable of doing anything else. If this is working for them, why should they stop? Who’s anyone to judge why someone stays in any given job for any amount of time?”
M., the vendor near Harley Street, told me how he has often come back to selling the magazine to help tide him over between jobs. “I’ve had long breaks from selling. One was an eight year break where I had other work. But it’s been good to have something I can come back to when I need it.”
“The best case is that our vendors sell the magazine for a bit to get on their feet and then move to something better, but we also believe that success can look different to that,” Valentim of Traços said. “For instance, we have one seller that has been with us for 10 years, after spending 30 years in the prison system. And she recently graduated from university. So that’s also a success for us.”
If you measure street papers against the benchmark of whether they permanently lift every vendor out of poverty, they will inevitably fall short. But as a project that creates income, routines, and conversations for people who might not have other options, street papers have clear value judging by what I heard from the people involved in making and selling them.
I’ll leave the last word to the one of the vendors themselves: “Honestly, what would I be doing without the Big Issue?” M. tells me. “What would I be doing with my time? How would I pay for anything? It’s kept me out of trouble. For me, it’s been really good.”