The Web Is Not Enough — Why These Left Media Workers Are Opening Physical Spaces

For years, PM Press operated out of Ramsey Kanaan’s cozy apartment, and Dan Fedorenko’s ramshackle garden shed. From these humble headquarters in Oakland, California, they packed and shipped books exploring anarchist, Marxist, and abolitionist ideas. Much like anarchist punks who distributed zines at shows throughout the ’90s, the publishers sold many copies through tabling, setting up at book fairs, academic conferences, flea markets, and rock shows.

Nineteen years later, PM still publishes radical books and still relies heavily on in-person sales, but its leaders aren’t tripping over boxes at home anymore. Instead, they’ve joined a small, quietly growing ecosystem of leftist media workers and publishers opening physical spaces, alongside outlets like The Kansas City Defender in Missouri, and publishers like Binch Press in Providence, Rhode Island; OR Books in New York City via the Francis Kite Club; and Haymarket Books in Chicago.

PM’s path to opening a community space was contingent on crisis. In 2017, the press rented a small warehouse in Oakland, only to find that its own workers couldn’t afford to live in the Bay Area amid rising rent. The pandemic hit amid these pressures and — ironically enough for an anti-state publisher — government relief offered them a crucial boost. A surge in mail order sales helped too, which was more profitable than selling books through distributors.

“For the first time in our lives, we actually looked good on paper,” co-founder Ramsey Kanaan told Truthout. “Meaning we actually could go to a bank and a bank would give us a loan for a mortgage.”

As its finances stabilized, PM purchased a massive warehouse in Binghamton, a relatively affordable Rust Belt city in upstate New York, in 2022. About a year later, PM Pressalso bought the renowned Autumn Leaves Bookstore in Ithaca, New York.

While PM has long been a “disseminator of ideas,” as Kanaan put it, the warehouse gives those ideas a physical life. It has hosted two anarchist book fairs drawing crowds of hundreds or thousands to upstate New York; is home to a local program that distributes free backpacks with school supplies to local youth; and on any given day might hold a drag show, a collective meeting, a dance party, a self-defense class, or a book club.

Kanaan situates the warehouse within a longer tradition of movement-owned spaces. As a youth, he spent time in political meetings at buildings owned by the Communist Party. While he has critiques of the Communists, he said owning buildings allowed them to be particularly effective at providing an institutional framework for nurturing and sustaining political commitments. He also draws inspiration from City Lights Bookstore, a San Francisco bookstore that has remained open since 1953 in part because it owns its building. The press hopes that purchasing the warehouse will similarly allow it to become a durable institution whose history can accumulate and build on itself over time. However, that longevity is not guaranteed: PM Press needs to pay off a $250,000 mortgage to secure its future.

“Good old-fashioned human interaction is the way that you actually build [movements]. Not through a virtual world that is owned and manipulated by corporations and the right,” said Kanaan. “If organizing was about virtue signaling, or simply having the right ideas, we’d have won 500 years ago. But actually, to win anything, you have to be organized.”

The Press and the People

Some media workers have reached similar conclusions. The Kansas City Defender, a Black-led nonprofit publication in Missouri, opened a headquarters about six months ago that nurtures both community organizing and journalism under one roof — rejecting the typical divide that exists between the press and the people.

The Defender pairs its editorial work with a robust community programs wing aimed at building material and political power through mutual aid, political education, and arts and culture events.

Like other news organizations, The Defender publishes breaking news and investigations. But it also prioritizes community-driven narrative building, including stories sourced from the streets. Unlike most outlets, The Defender pairs its editorial work with a robust community programs wing aimed at building material and political power through mutual aid, political education, and arts and culture events. These efforts include a free clothing program, a free grocery program, an abolitionist free school, public town halls, open mic nights, cookouts, and more. A third wing — strategic support and operations — sustains the work by securing revenue, primarily through philanthropy funding, enabling the organization to employ four full-time and 10 part-time members, with additional support from about 40 volunteers.

The Defender positions itself within the lineage of the Black radical press, drawing inspiration from The Black Panther newspaper, according to founder Ryan Sorrell. “I’ve spoken to Dr. E. James West, a scholar on the history of the Black press, and a lot of his work discusses the importance of physical buildings and how they function within the Black community,” he told Truthout. “Black press buildings used to function as community centers and used to be the second-most influential institution in the Black community, behind the Black church.”

Sorrell decided to launch the publication in 2021 after seeing how Black-led movements were at the mercy of narratives pushed by mostly white-owned legacy outlets during the George Floyd uprising. In the early days, he rented a video camera and interviewed Black people on the streets, strategically emphasizing Black arts and culture to draw locals in. The publication’s tone later became more overtly political.

“Black press buildings used to function as community centers and used to be the second-most influential institution in the Black community, behind the Black church.”

The Defender garnered international attention less than a year later, after Sorrell broke a story about a local serial killer targeting predominantly Black sex worker women. “Our police department tried to say that we were lying about it, and they put out a statement that said these are completely unfounded rumors, and there’s no basis to support these claims,” said Sorrell. Meanwhile, the mainstream media parroted the police department’s rhetoric. Three weeks later, a 21-year-old Black woman escaped from a torture dungeon 30 minutes outside of Kansas City where she had been held captive. “She told the detectives that she had been kidnapped off of Prospect Avenue,” said Sorrell, “which was the exact same street that I said in my reporting.”

Some local Black residents said they appreciated that the publication listened to them and challenged the police’s narrative. As hundreds reached out to The Defender asking how they could volunteer, the outlet began holding meetings in Sorrell’s apartment building, an informal organizing process that eventually gave rise to its community programs wing.

After building the organization for several years, The Defender was well-positioned to address a local crisis when it arose in 2024. Willa’s Books & Vinyl, the longest-standing Black-owned bookstore in the city, was one week away from being forced to surrender its archive to white speculators. For decades, Willa Robinson, known to the community as Ms. Willa, had poured her heart and soul into collecting texts centering Black people, including first-edition Frederick Douglass volumes. Defender mutual aid leaders Nina Kerrs and Lauren Winston mobilized alongside 40 other volunteers to catalog more than 20,000 books of Ms. Willa’s, and the mutual aid team was able to cover her rent.

Ms. Willa, whose health has been declining, ultimately decided to pass over her lease to The Defender in July 2025. “In a powerful intergenerational transfer of knowledge and power, she is passing the torch to us and we will be continuing her legacy and transforming her storefront into a free Black public archive, mutual-aid hub, Abolitionist Freedom School site, and the Defender’s first brick-and-mortar HQ,” The Defender announced.

“There’s a very deep need for physical space, or even physical products that people can touch and feel and connect to. People feel lonelier, and they need intergenerational third spaces.”

With the lease secured, Sorrell has been strategizing and connecting with others who have similar goals of opening physical spaces. One of them is Andrea Faye Hart, a co-steward of Build Coffee and Books in Chicago, who purchased the business alongside her friends Eve L. Ewing and trina reynolds-tyler in May 2025. The three had been involved with community programming at the cafe for years, which has served as a center for art, activism, and community-led journalism in the increasingly unaffordable Woodlawn neighborhood in Chicago.

The co-founders chose not to profit from the business, though staff will be paid. “We didn’t take over Build because we want to be wealthy, or to replicate Build everywhere,” said Hart. Instead, the three asked how they could run a community-based coffee shop and newsroom that extends its impact beyond the space itself. “How can we be a space that nourishes people?” Hart asked. “Maybe a seed is planted when someone comes into the store, or they meet somebody and decide to collaborate.”

Operating as a business has allowed the collective a degree of autonomy that Hart says can be elusive in the nonprofit world. “The downside of heavy foundation funding is that it can sometimes influence the way you do things,” said Hart, who spent years working in media nonprofits. She hopes to reintroduce a project similar to the Public Newsroom, a participatory workshop series where people come together to unpack local issues, that she previously helped run at Build. Since taking over the space, the group has screened the film Sugarcane, hosted a teen book club, organized collective letter-writing to incarcerated people, and swapped sourdough starter kits.

Much like Kanaan, Hart framed the urgent need for physical gathering spaces as a response to billionaires’ growing control over, and manipulation of, the virtual world. “There’s a very deep need for physical space, or even physical products that people can touch and feel and connect to,” she said. “People feel lonelier, and they need intergenerational third spaces. For us, it’s essential that Build is a place where people of all ages can spend time, relax, and feel genuinely welcomed.”