About Zodiac News Service

Zodiac News Service

Zodiac News Service was an alternative news agency based in San Francisco, founded in August 1972 by Jon Newhall. From an office on Howard Street, in the then low-rent South of Market district, its small staff produced daily news packets — typed, mimeographed, collated and mailed, Monday through Friday — to hundreds of FM and college radio stations, newspapers and alternative weeklies across the United States and Canada. Its subject matter was the news the mainstream wires underplayed: the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights, the environment, marijuana law reform, women's issues and rock and roll, leavened with the odd "man bites dog" items Newhall called "bizarros." The service operated until about 1981.

Zodiac belonged to the generation of alternative media institutions that grew out of the 1960s counterculture, but it defined itself against the era's amateurism: its stated mission was to provide reliable news, produced according to journalistic ethics and standards, to outlets seeking sources of news not reported in the mainstream media.

Jon Newhall and the Earth News Inheritance

Jon Newhall came to Zodiac from Earth News, the short-lived news service of Earth magazine, where he had worked before founding his own agency in 1972. Earth News had pioneered the idea of a wire aimed at the new FM and college radio audience; when it folded, Newhall carried the concept — and presumably its address book of subscribers — into Zodiac.

Newhall's background was, on its face, establishment. He was the son of Scott Newhall, owner of The Newhall Signal and the former long-time editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and of Ruth Newhall, a Chronicle reporter who later became editor of The Signal herself. That the younger Newhall used a mainstream newspaper upbringing to build a wire for the counterculture press gave Zodiac an insider's understanding of how newsrooms actually used wire copy — what length, what tone, what reliability a subscribing editor needed at deadline.

The Daily Packet

Zodiac's production routine was deliberately low-technology and labour-intensive. Monday through Friday, the staff chose stories from local and national publications, along with original pieces, in the Howard Street office. The articles were typed up, run through a mimeograph machine, and collated. The packets were stuffed into envelopes, run through a postage machine, and driven to the post office for delivery to subscribers.

The address that appears on surviving Zodiac releases from the mid-1970s is 950 Howard Street, San Francisco, California 94103, and the releases were headed with the names of the service's contacts — Jon Newhall, Scott Farley and Marlene Edmunds among them — and the instruction "Please credit Zodiac (ZNS)" on items used. That credit line was the agency's currency: each credit in a college paper or on an FM newscast advertised the service to the next prospective subscriber.

What Zodiac Covered

The packet's editorial mix was its identity. Zodiac produced daily packets of anti-Vietnam War, civil rights, environment, marijuana, women's issues and rock and roll news — the beats of the movement press — and treated them with wire-service discipline rather than pamphleteering. A subscriber station could read a Zodiac item on the air, or a weekly could print it, in the confidence that it had been selected and rewritten to professional standards.

Surviving releases also show the service's appetite for assassination research and official-secrecy stories, a staple of 1970s alternative journalism. A Zodiac release of December 31, 1975, for example, reported — crediting private investigator Harold Weisberg's book Post Mortem — that a newly released court transcript indicated the Los Angeles Police Department had destroyed key evidence in the Robert F. Kennedy assassination case despite a court decision that the evidence should be preserved. Whatever a reader makes of such stories, they illustrate the service's working definition of news "not reported in the mainstream media": material from court records, dissident researchers and movement sources that the big wires had passed over.

Subscribers and Reach

Zodiac's subscribers included FM and college radio stations, newspapers and alternative weeklies across the United States and Canada. At its height, the service was carried by hundreds of news outlets — a remarkable reach for a mimeographed mail packet in the decade before fax and email distribution, and evidence of how underserved the alternative media market was after the big underground papers of the 1960s had contracted.

For radio especially, Zodiac filled a structural gap. The commercial wires wrote for newspapers; their copy was long and print-oriented. A service assembled by people who had worked in the Earth News radio format understood the short, spoken item a campus or FM newsreader actually needed.

Her Say: The Feminist Wire Within the Wire

In 1977, Zodiac staffers Marlene Edmunds and Anne Millner formed Her Say, a feminist alternative news service, along with Shelley Buck. Zodiac News Service distributed the Her Say dispatches — an arrangement that let a specialist service reach radio newsrooms through Zodiac's established mailing list and production routine.

By 1980, Her Say had over 100 radio subscribers, as well as print outlets such as Ms. and Mother Jones. The episode captures something characteristic of the alternative media economy of the period: tiny services nested inside one another, sharing presses, postage meters and subscriber lists, each adding a beat the others lacked. Zodiac's willingness to carry Her Say also extended its own women's-issues coverage from a packet topic into a dedicated wire.

People and Spin-Offs

Staff at Zodiac News Service went on to found various publications, and the service functioned in San Francisco's media ecology as a training ground as much as a newsroom. The names on its mid-1970s releases — Newhall, Scott Farley, Marlene Edmunds, Jim Blodgett — recur across the Bay Area alternative press of the period, and the Her Say founders' later careers began at the Howard Street mimeograph.

This alumni effect was typical of the alternative wire services, which could rarely pay well or promise longevity, but offered young journalists real editorial responsibility — choosing, rewriting and shipping a national news report every day — that mainstream newsrooms reserved for veterans.

The End, About 1981

Zodiac News Service is listed as defunct from about 1981. The date fits the economics of its model: a mailed, mimeographed packet faced rising postal and paper costs, while the alternative press itself was professionalizing into formats — glossy magazines, NPR-style public radio — with their own news-gathering. The movement beats Zodiac had pioneered in 1972 were by 1981 covered, at least occasionally, by the mainstream outlets that had once ignored them, narrowing the gap the service existed to fill.

Zodiac and the Alternative Press System

Zodiac did not invent alternative syndication. With the advent of the underground press in the 1960s, associations such as the Underground Press Syndicate, and later the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, had worked together to syndicate material — including weekly comic strips — for each other's publications. What distinguished Zodiac within that tradition was its form: not a loose exchange among member papers, but a daily, staffed, subscription wire on the commercial model, sold to radio stations as well as print outlets, and edited centrally in San Francisco rather than assembled from whatever member publications chose to share.

Legacy

Zodiac News Service demonstrated, for nearly a decade, that an alternative wire could be run as a wire — daily, disciplined, credited and subscribed to by hundreds of outlets — rather than as a bulletin board of the movement. It carried the Earth News idea through the 1970s, incubated Her Say, and left an archive of daily packets, preserved in research collections and in the files of the researchers it quoted, that historians of the counterculture press now use as a day-by-day record of what the alternative media thought the news was.