Reader cofounder and original editor Bob Roth had some radical ideas about editors. He didn’t want them to prescribe what went into the paper, or to solicit it. He wanted the stories to crop up like some natural urban flora and make their way on their own to the Reader office. The editors’ jobs would […]
Category: News & Politics
Posted inPodcasts
Listen to The Ben Joravsky Show
The Ben Joravsky Show livestreams every Tuesday through Friday between 1 PM and 3 PM here at chicagoreader.com/joravsky and on the Reader‘s YouTube channel. The show is released as a podcast each day after the live taping. Podcast-only episodes are also released throughout the week. Support the show by becoming a Ben Head.
Posted inNews & Politics
‘House of Screams’ revisited
The reporting is an icon of the paper’s journalism, but John Conroy wonders what it actually accomplished.
Posted inEssay
‘Hello, woman of color’
W hen I started at the Reader in October 2018, there were 16 people on staff, all of them white except graphic designer Sue Kwong, who sidled up next to me on my first day with a good-natured, “Hello, woman of color.” We laughed, and I appreciated that her welcome eased my familiar tension of […]
Posted inPodcasts
Listen to the new Chicago Queer & Now podcast
Two Reader staffers explore all things queer Chicago.
Posted inNews & Politics
Two priests, a rabbi, and the Sex Pig
“Nice work, but you’re not ready,” Bob McCamant declared, after flipping through the portfolio of 16-by-20-inch black-and-white prints I had spent many darkroom hours creating. We sat in his office at Reader headquarters on Illinois Street, in 1986, the year I graduated from Columbia College. McCamant was one of the group of four who’d founded […]
Posted inNews & Politics
50 years of a Chicago weekly
The history of the Reader reflects the larger history of newspaper publishing in the United States. This timeline traces the paper’s changing fortunes over the course of a half-century.
Posted inNews & Politics
Kinky or killer?
During a trial over a grisly murder, prosecutors and journalists alike traded in homophobic, sex-negative tropes that some say do a disservice to the victim and the BDSM community.
Posted inCity Life
Long live the classifieds!
A young person’s dive into the history of the once lucrative section and its humble future.
Posted inNews & Politics
The Reader at 50
A deep dive into how this city’s alt-weekly made it through five decades
Posted inNews & Politics
A revolutionary act
BIPOC growers on what it’s like to urban farm on the south and west sides
Posted inNews & Politics
Archive Dive
A daily dip into the stacks, leading up to our 50th anniversary in October
Posted inNews & Politics
Medicaid has been good to my body, but it has abandoned my brain
I want choice, not a fistful of deeply unhelpful options wrestled, after months, from the banal, cruel system we make poor people navigate to access health care.
Posted inNews & Politics
Liaisons and order
The city bolstered its team of officers who engage with LGBTQ+ citizens. Queer people say that’s not enough.
Posted inNews & Politics
After 34 years, a murder conviction quietly reversed in four minutes
James Allen still has two murder cases keeping him in prison.