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

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)

View Chicago Reader, January 17, 2008

Cover Story

The South Loop Issue
Third in our series on city neighborhoods

A Long Way From "Satan's Mile"
The booming South Loop has a tortuous and tawdry tale to tell.
History by Martha Bayne

Land of the Loft
The booming South Loop has a tortuous and tawdry tale to tell.
Architecture by Lynn Becker

An Independent Streak
South Loop voters gave Second Ward alderman Robert Fioretti the power
Politics by Ben Joravsky

Street Level
What to do and where to do it in the South Loop: bars, restaurants, music, movies, theater, comedy, dance, shopping, pet care, bookstores, libraries, galleries, museums, GLBTQ resources, parks, volunteering, and more.

Columns

The Straight Dope
What are colloids and should I be ingesting more of them?
By Cecil Adams

Savage Love
Advice for gay teens
By Dan Savage

Features

This week’s crossword: Ease Out (PDF)
Ink Well by Ben Tausig

Food & Drink

Corn-Syrup-Free Zone
A Kraft refugee applies old-country methods to create a whole new caramel.
Omnivorous by Mike Sula

Arts & Entertainment

Music

Would You Give This Man a Record Label?
Hiring celebrity blogger Perez Hilton as an A and R man might not be such a terrible idea after all. Plus: Pitchfork TV and a Q & A with Pitchfork's Ryan Schreiber.
Sharp Darts by Miles Raymer

Movies

The Same Movie Twice
Michael Haneke's American remake of his own Funny Games adds nothing to the original.
Sharp Darts by Miles Raymer

The European Union Film Festiva

About Chicago Reader:

Published since 1971, the Chicago Reader is widely recognized as one of the leading alternative weeklies in the U.S. It specializes in features rather than news, with emphasis on urban issues and politics, arts and culture, and literary journalism that seeks to capture the spirit of contemporary city life. The paper has won numerous journalistic awards and honors, both local and national, and is well-known as a showcase for Chicago’s most talented writers, critics, photographers, and illustrators.

The Reader is also well-known for its indispensable guides to Chicago theater, film, arts, and music, and for an extensive classified advertising section that focuses on the needs of young urban adults. It is a controlled-circulation newspaper distributed primarily in city neighborhoods where young people live in high concentrations.

Where can you find the Reader?

The Reader is distributed at more than 1,400 locations; distribution begins on Thursday and is completed by Friday at 2 PM. The average circulation of the Reader for the six months ending June 30, 2004 was 119,606. Circulation figures are audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC).

The Reader is distributed in Evanston, Rogers Park, Edgewater, Albany Park, Jefferson Park, Uptown, Lakeview, Lincoln Park, Old Town, Logan Square, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Near North, Loop, Printers Row/Near South, Near West Side, Pilsen, Hyde Park, and Beverly.

Chicago Reader Online - www.chicagoReader.com

The Reader’s Web sites are designed to emphasize function, speed, and ease of use. They offer a variety of features and services including Spacefinder, a sophisticated and very popular apartment-searcher; Chicago Reader On Film, which includes weekly movie Showtimes and an archive of more than 10,000 reviews; the Reader Restaurant Finder, featuring ratings and comments from more than 2,000 Reader Restaurant Raters; and The Straight Dope, the on-line home of Cecil Adams, the man who knows everything. Also available are Reader Classifieds, Matches personal ads, entertainment listings, and more.

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