The Voice

Issue date: 4/27/09 Section: Kaleidoscope

Media Credit: Chris Asadian Harvey Ovshinsky started the underground newpaper The Fifth Estate in 1965 and has been working in media ever since. Here, he's asking an assistant over the phone to find the ominous music he wants for an upcoming film for HKO Productions, based out of his Ann Arbor home.

In his home office on a sleepy grove near the Arboretum in Ann Arbor, Harvey Ovshinsky is spouting off on the state of today's media environment, but his words are nothing what one might expect from a man who challenged the local news establishment four decades ago when he started The Fifth Estate,
Detroit's first alternative newspaper.

There was no dancing on the grave of "mainstream" publications like The Ann Arbor News or gloating about the struggles of so many industry giants, but rather sadness.

"I'd never thought I'd say this, but we need the establishment press," he said. "You can be targeted by what you're interested in and read what makes you feel comfortable in a blog, but I want to know what I don't know about. (Newspapers) introduce us to new ideas, thoughts and experiences that we might become better human beings if we were aware of them."

Ovshinsky was just 17 when he saw a niche market for a publication that spoke to those neglected by the two major Detroit papers in the mid-'60s . . . not dissimilar to the battle cry of many bloggers today-he was combating the square nature of the papers, which he said "you never saw a person who was young, black or gay in unless they were
being arrested."

So he started a publication that catered to leftist politics and pop culture, doing stories on places like the "Love-In" on Belle Isle and capturing it with a fish-eye
camera lens. Even more notably, he did crazy stuff - for back then, anyway - like color photos and unjustified wraparound text way before it was in vogue.

After spending the summer of '6 in Los Angeles and working for The Los Angeles Free Press - another trailblazing alternative rag - Ovshinsky, 62, returned to his native Detroit and came across headlines in the local papers like "Police to squelch teen party raids - hoodlums harass suburbs" and "Interracial marriage OK'd by Detroit Area Methodists." It underscored a void in attention to the cultural revolution he already saw brewing on the West Coast.

Continued...

Page 1 of 3 next >

Article Tools