The Chicago Reader, or Reader (stylized as ЯEADER), is an American nonprofit alternative newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a group of friends from Carleton College.
The Reader is recognized as a pioneer among alternative weeklies for both its creative nonfiction and its commercial scheme. Richard Karpel, then-executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, wrote:
[T]he most significant historical event in the creation of the modern alt-weekly occurred in Chicago in 1971, when the Chicago Reader pioneered the practice of free circulation, a cornerstone of today's alternative papers. The Reader also developed a new kind of journalism, ignoring the news and focusing on everyday life and ordinary people.
After being owned by same four founders since 1971, by the early 2000s profits and readership of the Reader were dropping, and ownership changed several times between 2007 and 2018. In 2022, the owners transferred the Reader to a new non-profit organization, the Reader Institute for Community Journalism.
On June 22, 2020, the Reader, citing a 90% drop in advertising revenue due to COVID-19 shutdowns, announced that it was pivoting from a weekly to a biweekly print schedule, with a renewed focus on digital content and storytelling and a refreshed special issues calendar. The Reader is dated every other Thursday and distributed free on Wednesday and Thursday via street boxes and cooperating retail outlets. the paper claimed to have nearly 1,200 locations in the Chicago metropolitan area and circulation of 60,000.
Publication history
1971–1995
The Chicago Reader was founded by Robert A. Roth, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. His ambition was to start a weekly publication for young Chicagoans like Boston's The Phoenix and Boston After Dark. Those papers were sold on newsstands but were also given away, mostly on campuses, to bolster circulation. Roth believed that 100-percent free circulation would work better, and he persuaded several friends from Carleton College, including Robert E. McCamant, Thomas J. Rehwaldt and Thomas K. Yoder, to join him in his venture. They scraped together about $16,000 in capital and published the first issue, 16 pages, on October 1, 1971.
One year later, in its first anniversary issue, the Reader published an article titled "What Kind of Paper is This, Anyway?" in which it answered "Questions we've heard over and over in the past year." This article reported that the paper had lost nearly $20,000 in its first ten months of operation but that the owners were "confident it will work out in the end." It explained the rationale behind free circulation and the paper's unconventional editorial philosophy: "Why doesn't the Reader print news? Tom Wolfe wrote us, 'The Future of the newspaper (as opposed to the past, which is available at every newsstand) lies in your direction, i.e., the sheet willing to deal with "the way we live now."' That sums up our thoughts quite well: we find street sellers more interesting than politicians, and musicians more interesting than the Cubs. They are closer to home."
In its early years the Reader was published out of apartments shared by the owner-founders, Roth, McCamant, Rehwaldt and Yoder. The first apartment was in Hyde Park—the University of Chicago neighborhood on the south side of Chicago—and the second was in Rogers Park on the far north side. Working for ownership in lieu of pay, the owner-founders ultimately owned more than 90% of the company. In 1975 the paper began to earn a profit, incorporated, and rented office space in the downtown area that later came to be known as River North.
In 1979, a reporter for the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois, called the Reader "the fastest growing alternative weekly in the U.S." In 1986, an article in the Chicago Tribune estimated the Reader'''s annual revenues at $6.7 million. In 1996, Crain's Chicago Business projected revenue of $14.6 million. The National Journal's Convention Daily (published during the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago) reported that the Reader was "an enormous financial success. It's now as thick as many Sunday papers and is published in four sections that total around 180 pages." This report put the circulation at 138,000.