Photo Credit: Bob Eddy

Sometimes you aren’t sure what you are doing, but you still feel compelled to do it.

That was the case when we launched The Advocate thirty years ago. And it’s the case again today as we foist The Advocate Online upon you!

Driven by Gen-X nostalgia and the arrival of middle age, we present all 10 issues of The Advocate, which was an alternative newspaper published in Randolph, Vermont, USA from 1988-1990.

No one asked for this. Maybe that’s because only a handful of people remember The Advocate (and of that handful only some remember it fondly).

An important disclaimer: The Advocate was published 30 years ago by a small group of teenagers growing up in rural Vermont. What you see across the issues are young people trying to figure things out, push boundaries and explore ideas as they were coming into their own. As we prepared the issues for this project, we laughed at the memories, giggled at the irreverence and cringed at some of the self righteousness and rebellious posturing. Although our ideas, positions and opinions have changed, we believe The Advocate serves as an important snapshot in time.

What did The Advocate represent? As Scott says in the commentary on Issue One, “There was rebelliousness and angst, but also a simple desire to contribute and participate as citizens.”

Our goal with The Advocate Online (TAO) is to preserve the archive in digital form. TAO includes digital copies of all published issues of The Advocate from its original run. We’ll also publish searchable text versions of the articles and other select content including commentaries, “bonus” archival content, behind the scenes photos, original handwritten manuscripts of reader submissions (and more – Ed.).

There was rebelliousness and angst, but also a simple desire to
contribute and participate as citizens.

The vision of The Advocate was in our Declaration of Intent:

We the Editors and Creators of The Advocate, hope to bring to our readers insight into topics that we feel merit attention, but have remained unexplored by most current periodicals. In other words, we want to print stuff that asks the reader to forget what it has learned and re-examine the world it lives in.

In the months ahead, we expect our editorial influence to diminish, as our reader input grows to shape the character of The Advocate for today and the future. To put it bluntly, the three of us aren’t gonna do it all alone.

We believe that The Advocate should be a forum for the discussion of ideas and not for the conveyance of absolutes. So, to sum it all up, we really just want to shoot the shit with you.

The values of The Advocate were found in our call for reader submissions:

The Advocate is open to submissions from anyone with a concern to voice, a mind to speak, or a tale to tell. Our open-minded editors individually review each submission and evaluate it solely on the basis of quality. We regret that due to budget constraints we may be unable to publish all materials deemed acceptable. Any submissions become the property of The Advocate and can only be returned if accompanied by a S.A.S.E.. Don’t let this scare you off, though. What you have to say is important and we want to let everybody hear it.

We aren’t sure what this 21st Century version of The Advocate will become, but whatever happens, we want you, “our faithful reader,” to be part of it. We invite you to participate by leaving comments on individual articles or you can comment directly in the text of articles using the Genius Web Annotator. To get started, check out all of the issues posted on the Issu platform or start with our commentary on Issue One.

– Scott and Brendan

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