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 priniting 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 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, 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: 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) and The Straight Dope.

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 Chris Ware is regularly featured in the newspaper. The Reader's main film critic is Jonathan Rosenbaum. The Reader runs the weekly comic DIRTFARM by Ben Claassen III.

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 was slow to offer its content on the Internet, but now it has most of its articles, features, listings and advertisements available from its website.

(From wikipedia, the free encyclopeida)

Read Chicago Reader, August 7, 2008 Online

Cover Story: Brutal Beauty

One of the world's largest collections of shoes for bound feet is in Chicago, but it's not at the Field Museum or the Art Institute—it's in Paul Prentice's apartment.
By Deanna Isaacs

In search of airplane reading material before a trip to China last spring, I grabbed Lisa See’s popular novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan from a bookstore shelf and was promptly riveted by her description of foot binding. Nothing in my glancing awareness of this practice prepared me for the details she provided: that it was inflicted on girls as young as three years old, that “the arch and toes of the foot must be broken and bent under to meet the heel,” and that the ideal result would fit into a shoe no more than three inches long.

I knew that foot binding was female mutilation, falling somewhere on the continuum between clitoral cutting and ear piercing; what I didn’t know was that it had been practiced for nearly a thousand years, that the bound foot—no less than the bountiful breast in Western culture—represented an epitome of female beauty, and that the obsessively decorated coverings for these status-symbol stubs constituted their own complex and prized folk art genre. ...

Letters

"I see at least five other people with the exact same problem. Lollapalooza had placed a $205 ticket in a $0.01 piece of fabric."

Columns

Stop Big Media . . . Before It Stops Itself Why is Sam Zell the new whipping boy for crusaders who think corporate media still sucks?
Hot Type by Michael Miner

Three Million Lawsuits Oughta Do It A downstate court ruling empowers Chicago taxpayers to sue the city for TIF abuse.
The Works by Ben Joravsky

The Straight Dope
Lightning rods work—or do they?
By Cecil Adams

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