By June 1967, a UPS conference in Iowa City hosted by "Middle Earth" drew 80 newspaper editors from US and Canada, including representatives of Liberation News Service. LNS, founded by Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo that summer, would play an equally important and complementary role in the growth and evolution of the underground press in the United States. An attempt that summer to coordinate and centralize the UPS at the offices of the "East Village Other" in New York City by Bob Rudnick failed.