Survivor
Bill Johnson
The longest surviving community publisher standing, the former press secretary to Congressman Pete McCloskey launched the Palo Alto Weekly in 1979 as an alternative to the now-buried Peninsula Times Tribune daily. Bill Johnson’s weekly became the first newspaper to in the country to post all of its content for free on the World Wide Web (“I barely knew what it was,” he confesses) after a reader volunteered to build the paper’s website at no charge. Like Metro, which started six years later, the Weekly resisted the urge to sell during the free press heyday and remains owned by community investors rather than a corporate parent.
