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Chicago Reader

The Chicago Reader is an alternative newsweekly in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded in 1971 by a group of friends who attended Carleton College. In July 2007, the Reader was sold to Creative Loafing, and in mid-September 2007, it was announced that printing of the paper has been outsourced to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Milwaukee printing facilities .

Issues are dated every Friday and distributed free to more than 1,400 locations in the Chicago metropolitan area on Thursday and Friday. As of June 2006, the average weekly circulation, audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, was 120,204, down from more than 138,000 just five years before.

The Reader has served two significant roles in Chicago. First, it offers local news and commentary. Because it is funded largely through extensive classified advertising and by small businesses, the Reader's journalism can be hard-hitting. Though the paper is famous/infamous for long, exhaustive cover stories, a la The New Yorker, it has always offered a variety of stories in a variety of lengths and voices, plus extensive arts coverage. In recent years, most of its cover stories have been of a fairly typical magazine-feature length, but some now believe the paper's overall quality has declined. Second, it offers an extensive guide to Chicago, primarily its culture and real-estate.

Format

The work of acclaimed comic book artist and cartoonist Chris Ware used to run regularly in the newspaper. The Reader's main film critic is J.R. Jones. The Reader hosts the Web site holding the past and current writings of its former chief critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. The Reader often runs the weekly comic DIRTFARM by Ben Claassen III.

The Reader’s Guide to Arts & Entertainment, a spin-off launched in 1996, was a free weekly repackaging of the Reader's entertainment listings and arts writing for the suburbs north, northwest and west of Chicago. Publication was suspended in August 2007 and suburban circulation of the city paper was expanded.

The Reader was slow to offer its content on the Internet, but now posts all of its content and archives online for free website.