Big Issue content - Criticized.

Reference:

Howley, K. (2005) Community Media: People, Places and Communication Technologies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

"From the  outset, TBI's [The Big Issue] approach - glossy covers, a paid professional writing staff, general interest features, celebrity news, advertisements for upscale products, and a modest, but regular column featuring work by homeless people - alienated street paper workers whose vision was more activist orientated, less entrepreneurial."

"For Some, like Jon Bird, publisher of TBI, street papers are a business whereby the homeless and unemployed can earn a "respectable living" selling periodicals in streets, train stations, and other public spaces."

Howley notes of Hutchinson Persons mistake in the business plan of the simular press Street News in New York:

"In retrospect, Persons' entrepreneurial fervor obscured the rather disingenuous notion that selling newspapers could eliminate poverty and that the problem of homelessness and unemployment was the fault of the individual, not a a structural problem or a systemic failure.