At the turn of the century, John Cusack came home to Chicago to shoot a movie called High Fidelity. In it, he played a sad-sack hipster hiding out from adulthood in his used record shop, Championship Vinyl. Toward the end of the film, a young woman walks into the store and introduces herself as Caroline Fortis, a music reviewer for the Chicago Reader, the city’s alternative weekly. “You’re Caroline Fortis?” Cusack says, incredulously. “I read your column. It’s great. You really know what you’re talking about.” He’s so smitten, he makes her a mix tape.
Vinyl records. Mix tapes. Alternative weeklies. They seem part of another era now. But in 2000, when High Fidelity came out, the Reader was still a totem of Chicago’s underground scene. Every Thursday, stacks of fat, four-section papers were piled in the lobbies of bookstores, coffee shops, nightclubs, and liquor stores. By that evening, the Reader was under the arm of every L rider on the way home from an office job in the Loop, and in the backpack of every thrift-store chick on a one-speed bike.
The paper was the source for music listings and apartment classifieds. Starting on the cover, and winding through the ads, was a long, reported-to-the-pencil-nub tale about curing multiple sclerosis with bee venom or corruption in the Tollway Authority.
Today, if you made a movie about Chicago hipsters, Caroline Fortis probably wouldn’t write for the Reader. She’d write for Time Out Chicago, or Pitchfork, the music Webzine. The Reader still hits the streets every week, but as a single-section tabloid. Last year, shortly after its purchase by Creative Loafing, the Tampa-based chain, the paper laid off its entire design staff and four investigative reporters. And there’s a feeling around Chicago that the Reader has failed to catch on with the younger generation, and perhaps failed to try, at least until recently.
In 1995, when I quit my job at a downstate Illinois newspaper and moved to Chicago, my goal was to work for the Reader. I broke in with a long narrative about learning to play the horses from a professional tout, and worked my way up to staff writer. It was the best job I’ll ever have. At the Reader, you could write about anything, at any length, in any style. I turned out pieces on a teenaged Frank Sinatra impersonator, a man who sold socks by the freeway, and the “callers” who drummed up business outside hip-hop boutiques on the South Side. When I wrote my first book, Horseplayers: Life at the Track, the Reader paid my salary while I went to the races every day. All I had to do was write about the gamblers, a subculture the Reader loved.
The Reader was launched in 1971. At the time, the paper’s lakefront stronghold was populated by a mix of gays, artists, musicians, actors, and young professionals who were skeptical of the first Mayor Daley’s political machine. The so-called Lakefront Independents were key swing voters during Harold Washington’s 1983 campaign to become Chicago’s first black mayor. Right before the election, the Reader published an article aimed at reassuring white voters about Washington’s credentials. Widely copied and stuffed under apartment doors, it helped him squeak to victory. Throughout the council wars between white aldermen and Washington’s minority allies, the Reader remained in the mayor’s corner. Its star reporter, Gary Rivlin, went on to write Fire on the Prairie, the definitive book on that divisive era in Chicago.
As a newspaper that serves a narrow circulation area, the Reader doesn’t get to choose its audience. And the yuppies who’ve colonized the lakefront over the last twenty years don’t seem as interested in rage-against-the-machine muckraking. Lincoln Park, the heart of Reader Country, now has one of the few Republican ward offices in the city. The average home sells for $525,000. The new residents love the current Mayor Daley, who is considered less corrupt and racist than his father. They credit him with making the city safe for Barneys New York and Japanese restaurants with valet parking. The Reader still carries the banner of the Lakefront Independents, but that movement is down to one or two aldermen.
What is an "alternative" newspaper? What is it an alternative to? Seems like many of the papers that describe themselves as "alternatives" have damaged themselves by trying to stay "eternally youthful," as though the key to their survival rested in chasing and retaining a desirable demographic. The way any media organization survives is to stay relevant and important to the broadest number of people possible. You have to raise hell, week after week -- in addition to writing about Frank Sinatra impersonators and guys who play the ponies.
Posted by Charles Raymond on Tue 28 Oct 2008 at 03:11 PM
This article hit the nail on the head, but then the writer banged his thumb.
I too was among the many Chicagoans who rushed to pick up a Reader every Thursday before the piles of papers disappeared. But then the Reader stopped being interesting.
The problem is the Reader changed. If it had remained true to its oddball personality, it wouldn't have suffered such a decline. And it would still be considered hip. Remember, William Burroughs was never more cool than the day before he died -- at the age of 83.
Posted by Will Sachis on Tue 28 Oct 2008 at 03:22 PM
It doesn't have to be this way. Well, not entirely.
Ben Eason is right: The spirit of the altweekly is viable. It lives on every day online, though not necessarily in the websites of the papers themselves. The combination of in-depth reporting, intelligent and fearless criticism, irreverence, point of view, strong voices--this is the foundation of the alternative newsweekly. Some papers carry it off better than others, but the true alts have committed themselves to the principles set forth by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. These values can be idealized (and monetized) in an online environment.
But that will take some investment in innovation and risk, something too many alt publishers have not done since they founded their papers--back when an aggressive, muckraking, trendsetting weekly newspaper itself was a risky endeavor.
Publishing in a new platform doesn't require a compromise of values. It just demands some fresh thinking (more youthful, not necessarily younger, managers) and flexibility (executives who are willing trust these new thinkers and step out of their way).
Posted by Vanessa Martinez on Tue 28 Oct 2008 at 04:03 PM
Every publication desperately chasing after the 20-30 year old demographic by cutting down on its content and focusing on listings and short blurbs, as the Reader has done, needs to do what no consultant or media pundit will say: abandon the things that Craigslist, RSS readers, Daily Candy and Facebook do better, and focus on the one thing that print media still does best: long-form, investigative journalism. It's print's one remaining advantage, but in the pointless attempt to try and recapture long-lost revenue, it's the least valued. Every essay of media punditry I read seems to tell me that people in their 20's and 30's want short bites of information. True, but they're already getting that elsewhere. What they're not getting, and still desire, from most conversations I have with people in their 20's and 30's, is intelligent, in-depth journalism and discussion. This, I believe, is why NPR listenership has boomed in recent years among this demographic--they're the only "old media" outlet seeming to play to this core strength.
Posted by Paul M. Davis on Tue 28 Oct 2008 at 08:33 PM
Every publication desperately chasing after the 20-30 year old demographic by cutting down on its content and focusing on listings and short blurbs, as the Reader has done, needs to do what no consultant or media pundit will say: abandon the things that Craigslist, RSS readers, Daily Candy and Facebook do better, and focus on the one thing that print media still does best: long-form, investigative journalism. It's print's one remaining advantage, but in the pointless attempt to try and recapture long-lost revenue, it's the least valued. Every essay of media punditry I read seems to tell me that people in their 20's and 30's want short bites of information. True, but they're already getting that elsewhere. What they're not getting, and still desire, from most conversations I have with people in their 20's and 30's, is intelligent, in-depth journalism and discussion. This, I believe, is why NPR listenership has boomed in recent years among this demographic--they're the only "old media" outlet seeming to play to this core strength.
Posted by Paul M. Davis on Tue 28 Oct 2008 at 08:35 PM
Neal Pollack and Ted McClelland are full of it. When I was in college at the University of Chicago during the late 1990s, my friends all read the Reader because it published entertaining stories. We didn't read it because it attacked gentrification. Neal Pollack wrote better stuff than he does now.
Posted by Chris Samuels on Tue 28 Oct 2008 at 09:11 PM
I don't remember reading anything by Ted McClelland.
Posted by Chris Samuels on Tue 28 Oct 2008 at 09:22 PM
Because his name was Ted Kleine.
http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/daily-harold/tag/Edward%20McClelland/
Posted by Chris Samuels on Tue 28 Oct 2008 at 09:29 PM
The main reason I picked up The Reader over the years was for the entertainment listings. I was a young suburbanite who wanted to gobble the cultural scene in Chicago whole when I moved within the city limits. I read some of the articles, but frankly, long-form was something I never really got used to. I still appreciated that those articles existed, however, and considered it another plus in a good total package.
I still pick up The Reader for the listings because I'm not interested in checking the net every time I want to see what's playing in town. Hard copy is still portable with easy-to-access information that I like to really linger over; perhaps people younger than I prefer to use their cellphones for quick hits. Fine. I think there will always be people who prefer print copies that don't need to be recharged.
Despite the above admissions, I am distressed that there is less substantive content in The Reader. Even the listings aren't what they used to be. For example, the "expanded coverage" of the Chicago International Film Festival was much less than it had been in previous years, without the same number of capsule reviews and no feature articles about the fest or the stand-out movies; in the second week, took up about 1/2 a page.
Michael Miner, who I enjoy reading, complained about the reduction of the news hole and overreliance on letters in the redesigned Tribune, but the week that column ran, The Reader had no news hole and about 4 pages of online and mailed-in letters and shorts. Pot calling kettle, and all that.
There is still a need for alternative weeklies. The one I turn to the most is Streetwise.
Posted by Marilyn Ferdinand on Thu 30 Oct 2008 at 10:44 AM
You hear these nostalgic stories about the Reader from a very small population that tends to consist of former Reader writers and other members of Chicago's very exclusive hip-media clique. The reader has never been carried under the arm of every rider on the L. Not even close. The fact is, it's never been very readable. And it's never been very relevant. It's never been what the Village Voice was to New York or The Bay Guardian was to San Francisco or New Times was to Phoenix. Because it's always been too insular, followed essentially by those who now reminisce about it, and few others. For a long time it fooled advertisers into making it fat, even with tiny unreadable print between the ads. The rest of it picked it up for movie times and classifieds. And that's why it died without much fight.
Posted by Pete Dunne on Thu 30 Oct 2008 at 11:57 PM
Harold Henderson, who's as much of a Reader writer as there ever has been, says in this piece: "It would have been nice, the strategy of trying to be what the Reader had been, and it might have failed, but it would have been an honorable failure."
Marilyn Ferdinand, who sounds pretty much like a typical Reader reader to me, comments above: "The main reason I picked up The Reader over the years was for the entertainment listings."
Even in the Reader's glory days, publisher Bob Roth took every opportunity to distinguish between "readers" and "users" of the Reader. The users, he always emphasized, were the ones who paid the bills.
As an editor there, I was always telling writers, and anyone who asked, that the journalism we did -- the stuff that made our jobs fun and entitled us to feel Important -- was appreciated by perhaps 10 percent of the audience. The other 90 percent -- the people who picked up the paper to find out what time the movie was starting -- were what made all that fun work possible.
That's why we didn't go in the direction of "what the Reader had been." Of course we tried to maintain the core of it (and the present editors are trying just as hard under more difficult circumstances). But if your idea of "what the Reader had been" is mostly about the writers and the stories and the quirkiness, we didn't believe that would work even when it was working.
Posted by Mike Lenehan on Tue 4 Nov 2008 at 04:37 PM
Just surfed into this, and I have to say Pete Dunne is a fool. For decades, the Reader was the most important paper in Chicago, and much healthier financially than all the other alt-weeklies Dunne mentions. (Bay Guardian? You have got to be kidding!) The Reader was fat -- more than 200 pages some weeks -- and none of these other papers could make that claim. You also couldn't find a copy the day after the Reader hit the streets. No amount of snarky commentary can change those facts. The Reader was popular and successful.
Isn't it ironic, then, that one of the Reader's leaders, Mike Lenehan, admits that the owners decided to bet against their paper's personality, and now the Reader is in trouble and all these other papers are surviving? I think you made a tragic blunder, Mr. Lenehan, don't you? No value was added to the Reader's entertainment coverage -- it was always good -- when you decided to abandon journalism. That happened years before Eason entered the picture. Your huge mistake might have worked out for you and the owners, but it hurt my city. Right now, the Reader is a Web site with commentary that also has a print edition as an afterthought. You were obviously wrong about that 90/10 percent split. Without your 10, the 90 left. How do you explain that?
Posted by Alan Vlasic on Sun 21 Dec 2008 at 09:31 PM
I didn't say, nor do I believe, that we "decided to bet against [the Reader's] personality." I said that personality, if that’s what you want to call it, was always supported by less lofty stuff – the listings and classifieds and so on that paid the bills. When the listings and classifieds came under attack from the Web, we had to try other things to support the "personality." My point was that journalism by itself could not have supported a paper like the Reader even in the salad days of the mid-90s.
I can't imagine what you mean when you say we abandoned journalism. I think we tried hard (and Reader survivors are still trying) to preserve our kind of journalism in the face of secular changes that are making serious journalism of any kind less and less viable. Boring further into the "core" or "personality" of the Reader as you define it would not have worked any more than removing the food sections would strengthen the New York Times. Where exactly do you see journalism prospering. Mr. Vlasic? Show us, please, we’re all dying to know.
Posted by Mike Lenehan on Thu 23 Jul 2009 at 05:16 AM
Commenter Paul M. Davis comes the closest to capturing the problems confronting the alt-weekly model. His point is especially valid for the Chicago Reader, because it was such a unique product. Everyone I knew loved it and talked about it. I was happy to see this article try to explain what had happened.
Mike Lenehan's explanation is too facile: The Reader began to change for the worse before the collapse of print. I still pick it up occasionally for the excellent work of Ben Joravsky and Michael Miner, but I stopped searching it out in about 2003, a year when even the Tribune saw increased print advertising.
Posted by John Raymond on Wed 20 Jan 2010 at 09:20 AM