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, September 25, 2008 Online

Cover Story
Chicago 2016: Who Owns the Conversation?
Steve Frayne, owner of Chicago2016.com, says he wants a forum where the public can discuss Chicago’s Olympic bid. The Chicago bid committee says he just wants to get paid.
By Katie Buitrago

City officials and the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid committee are ramping up their campaign. Just a little over a year from now the International Olympic Committee will convene in Copenhagen to decide on the host city, and between now and then Chicago has to convince the world that it not only has the money and infrastructure to host the games but that its citizenry supports the effort.

Steve Frayne, a grad student at North­western’s Kellogg School of Management, doesn’t think Chicagoans should throw their weight behind the games just yet. “I don’t see a unified discussion of some of the deeper issues associated with the Olympics,” he says. He also says he wants to encourage that discussion. But how? ...

Columns
Colonel McCormick, Get Ready to Roll Over Is this the year the Tribune will endorse its first Democrat for president?
Hot Type by Michael Miner

The Endangered Watchdog Strapped for cash, yet another of the city's independent advocacy groups is foundering.
The Works by Ben Joravsky

The CSO Synergizes Itself Marketing its music through its own label, the symphony adds value with a new kind of lecture series.
The Business by Deanna Isaacs

The Straight Dope
Tapeworms as a weight-loss strategy
By Cecil Adams

Savage Love
"Low libido? Just half ass it."
By Dan Savage

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