The Reader at 50 OUR HISTORY
A deep dive into how this city’s alt-weekly made it through five decades By MARK JACOB
Reader founders (from left) Tom Rehwaldt, Bob Roth, Tom Yoder, and Bob McCamant in 1979 and today COURTESY DAILY HERALD/JEFF MARINI FOR CHICAGO READER
T
he Chicago Reader is a free newspaper, but its ads were once so prized that thieves would steal classified sections from the printing plant and sell them for a dollar apiece. The Reader was once so dominant that if it printed the wrong screening times for a movie, the theater would change the times. The Reader was once such a sensation that its revenue quadrupled in two years. And the Reader was once so unpredictable that it ran a 20,012-word story about beekeeping. Now, as the Reader marks its 50th anniversary, it aims to keep stirring up Chicago’s news ecosystem with a promising but notyet-proven strategy to go nonprofit and bring scores of other publications along on its campaign to promote community journalism. Since the first issue was put together on the dining room table of an apartment in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood and then published on October 1, 1971, the Reader has helped its core audience of young adults come into the city, comprehend it, and consume it. Though it was a pioneer among alt-weeklies, it wasn’t
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counterculture. It was young, urban culture. Asked whether the founders might have been considered hippies, the first managing editor, Nancy Banks, describes the early crew as “proto-yuppies.” The Reader covered politics and social issues, but it didn’t have a rigid editorial agenda. It did have a well-defined marketing plan to offer extensive classified ads and the best entertainment listings in town. Beyond that, it tended to go where its writers took it. Some call the Reader the nation’s first free alternative weekly, but that claim is iffy. While the Reader changed the game by proving that a free alt-weekly could be wildly profitable, Boston After Dark was distributing about twothirds of its print run as a free college edition before the Reader launched. You might call the Reader the nation’s longest-surviving free alt-weekly, since Boston After Dark is no longer around. But the Reader switched last year from weekly print publication to every other week. So is the Reader now an alt-biweekly? Instead of overthinking, let’s accept the framing by Richard Karpel, who headed the Association of Alternative News-
weeklies when he wrote in 2007 that “the most significant historical event in the creation of the modern alt-weekly occurred in Chicago in 1971, when the Chicago Reader pioneered the practice of free circulation.” The Reader debuted in a Chicago far different from today’s version. Three weeks before the first issue was published, the Woodfield Mall opened in suburban Schaumburg, claiming to be the largest enclosed retail center in the world. The year 1971 also saw the first women elected to the Chicago City Council, the closing of the Union Stockyards, and John Belushi joining the cast of the Second City comedy troupe. The Reader almost didn’t make it. Then it did, spectacularly, becoming a part of Chicago’s cityscape. Former Reader publisher Jane Levine recalls “the incredible physical presence that the paper had in the neighborhoods where it was distributed—those huge stacks of huge papers that would appear, and then disappear, in the entryways of record stores and bars and bookstores and student unions.” At the half-century mark, the Reader has built a legacy as a home for fine writing and in-
depth reporting, a driver of arts and culture, and proof that an alternative publication can invent a successful financial model. Now it’s trying to reinvent itself to survive as a nonprofit in a vastly different media environment. After 50 years, it’s still taking chances. Here’s how the whole thing happened.
THE DINING ROOM TABLE
In the winter of 1970-’71, two recent graduates of Minnesota’s Carleton College were sharing an apartment at 48th and Dorchester. One of them, Bob Roth, had grown up in suburban Arlington Heights and was pursuing a master’s in political science at the University of Chicago. The other, Tom Rehwaldt, was a substitute teacher in the Chicago Public Schools system. Roth roped his roommate into a project that was difficult and might have seemed a little bit crazy. No, not the Reader. Stripping off paint. “For some reason he conned me into stripping the paint off the fine woodwork in the apartment,” Rehwaldt says. “Which seems kind of crazy, that you would go to that effort to improve and gentrify somebody else’s
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