The Farmers' Alliance was organized in Texas in 1877, and soon spread through the South and Midwest. Farmers formed cooperatives to combat the crop-lien system that bound them to furnishing merchants and to oppose differential railroad rates that hampered the shipment of their crops. As it grew, the alliance began to demand other land, transportation, and monetary reforms that ultimately became part of the political framework of the Populist Party. To determine the role of the alliance press as a propaganda arm of the movement and as an integral communication and educational network of the alliance, a study was made of two Texas newspapers--the "Jacksboro Rural Citizen" and the "Dallas Morning News." The two papers represented two different styles of journalism and two points of view in a society under social and political tension. The "News" was a developing business institution in a modernizing journalistic world, while the "Citizen" was a small, rural paper dedicated to the farmers' movement. They represented different styles of business enterprise, served different audiences, and defined news and the public interest from different perspectives. By the end of 1886, however, the two papers had reached a similar conclusion: that the Farmers' Alliance should remain a nonpolitical body and that it should not affiliate with striking laborers. (FL)