The Occupied Wall Street Journal was founded by Arun Gupta and The Yes Men, with support from Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Code Pink. It made an international splash after its first edition of 50,000 copies hit the streets on October 1, 2011. Soon thereafter, Occupy newspapers sprung up across the country. Support from the Wallace Global Fund allowed the Occupy USA Today media project to fund and provide editorial and publishing assistance to nearly a dozen of these print publications nationwide.

Occupy Wall Street popularized the idea that political democracy is inseparable from economic democracy, which includes the media. Contrasted to the consolidation of mainstream media outlets under corporate financial and ideological control, independent media provides a public forum for debate, counters corporate media narratives, and trains a new generation of critical journalists. Print is uniquely powerful. Print journalists act collectively in the real world. They go into new communities, they have face-to-face conversations, they meet people where they're at and talk about the issues that matter to them. Distributing print media in person, as was done at the Occupy camps around the country, provides yet another opportunity for one-on-one discussion. Just as camping in public created the Occupy movement, print media sustained and grew it.