Editor Joel Bleifuss Circulation 43,000 (as of 2016) Founder James Weinstein | Frequency Monthly Publisher Joel Bleifuss | |
Categories Progressive news and opinion | ||
In These Times is an American politically progressive/democratic socialist monthly magazine of news and opinion published in Chicago, Illinois.
Contents
It was established as a broadsheet-format fortnightly newspaper in 1976 by James Weinstein, a lifelong socialist, with the aid of intellectuals including Julian Bond, Noam Chomsky and Herbert Marcuse.
It investigates alleged corporate and government wrongdoing, covers international affairs, and has a cultural section. It regularly reports on labor, economic and racial justice movements, environmental issues, feminism, grassroots democracy, minority communities, and the media.
Weinstein was the publication's founding editor and publisher; its current editor and publisher is Joel Bleifuss.
As of 2016, it had a circulation of over 43,000. As a nonprofit organization, the magazine is financed through subscriptions and donations.
History
In 1976, Weinstein, an historian and former editor of Studies on the Left, launched the politically progressive journal In These Times. He sought to model the newsweekly on the early-20th-century socialist paper the Appeal to Reason. For some time, its tagline was 'The Socialist Newsweekly'. "We intend to speak to corporate capitalism as the great issue of our time, and to socialism as the popular movement that will meet it" he told the Chicago Sun Times on the eve of the first issue's release. While Weinstein himself was involved with both the New American Movement and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, he wanted the journal to be independent of any one political party or faction. Thus, over the years it has published a wide variety of contributors – from anarchists, to union members, to centrists.
During the 1980s, the publication won notoriety for its investigative reporting of the Iran–Contra affair. It has since broken stories on the deliberate destruction of Iraqi water treatment plants by US forces during the first Gulf War (1990-1991), global warming, and on the emergence of mad cow disease.
During the 1980s, and up to 1992, it was a biweekly newspaper and a democratic-socialist competitor to the National Guardian, which was a biweekly newspaper that was closer to Marxism–Leninism.
Senior editor Silja J.A. Talvi won two National Council on Crime and Delinquency PASS Awards (2005, 2006) for her reporting on the impact of three strikes sentencing on African-American men, and on the trend toward privatization of the prison system.
The magazine was awarded the Utne Reader's Independent Press Award for Best Political Coverage in 2006.
Contributors
Two of the magazine's longest-running columns are Salim Muwakkil's The Third Coast, covering race relations, and Susan J. Douglas's Back Talk, a critical review of the mass media.
David Moberg has reported on labor and political economy for the magazine since its inception in 1976.
The magazine's editor Joel Bleifuss has written for it since the mid-1980s. More stories from his column, The First Stone, have been included in Project Censored's "Top 25 Censored Stories of the Year" than any other journalist.
Other columnists include H. Candace Gorman, Laura S. Washington and Terry J. Allen.
Current senior editors include Terry J. Allen, Patricia Aufderheide, Adam Doster, Douglas, Moberg, Muwakkil and David Sirota.
Notable contributors to the magazine have included:
Working In These Times
The magazine’s labor blog is one of the premier sources of news and analysis on the American labor movement in the country. It covers the struggles for workers’ rights across the country every day. The site’s weekly newsletter reaches over 25,000 people.