The Chicago Reader

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The Chicago Reader is an alternative newsweekly in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded in 1971^[1] by a group of friends who attended Carleton College.

Issues are dated every Friday and distributed free to more than 1,400 locations in Chicago and Chicagoland Thursday and Friday. As of June 30, 2005, the average weekly circulation, audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, was 118,513.

The Reader serves two significant roles in Chicago. First, it offers exceptional 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, in recent years most of its cover stories have been of a fairly typical magazine-feature length. Second, it offers an extensive guide to Chicago, primarily its culture and real-estate.

[edit] Format

Each issue consists of three sections (until mid-2006, four sections was the longstanding norm). Section 1 contains the lead story and also features local news and human interest stories, a weekly fashion feature, essay-style reviews of film, music, theater, art, dance, and books, and columns such as Hot Type (about other Chicago media), The Works (Chicago politics), The Straight Dope and Chicago Antisocial, a column about the nightlife adventures of staff writer Liz Armstrong.

Sections 2 and 3 contain listings for restaurants, movies, plays, museum and gallery exhibits, and live music for that week. Classified ads, as well as several indie comics such as Life in Hell and News of the Weird, end Sections 1 and 2.

The work of acclaimed comic book artist and cartoonist artist Chris Ware is regularly featured in the newspaper.

The Reader’s Guide to Arts & Entertainment, a spin-off launched in 1996, is a free weekly repackaging of the Reader's entertainment listings and arts writing for the suburbs north, northwest and west of Chicago.

The Reader now has most of its articles, features, listings and advertisements available from its website.

The Reader is idiosyncratic if not unique in its fiscal practices where payment of freelance writers is concerned. The editorial staff typically takes stories "on spec," and almost never as contractual assignments. Rates of compensation for cover stories and features remains open-ended until after publication, whereupon the author is informed how much her work is worth. Technically this leaves the Reader vulnerable to legal problems should the writer disagree with the rate offered after the fact of publication and decide to take action to obtain superior compensation. In practice, however, this issue rarely comes up, as most of the paper's freelance contributors are either newcomers to the market (i.e. inexperienced and exceptionally grateful for a chance to publish) or have a long term relationship with the paper and are therefore accustomed to this capricious system.