Chicago’s legendary alt-weekly is now an alt-monthly.
After a month-long hiatus, the Chicago Reader returns to the streets this week, now as a reformatted monthly publication. The switch follows the latest ownership change in what staff and readers hope marks the end of a tumultuous era.
Noisy Creek, publisher of the Portland Mercury and Seattle’s The Stranger, has assumed ownership of the Reader with plans to implemented a recovery plan based on a mix of philanthropy and advertising in the now monthly publication. Noisy Creek also plans to bring its ticketing outfit, Bold Type Tickets, and EverOut to Chicago to benefit the Reader’s bottom line (which makes 5 Mag one of a vanishingly few music and news outlets that doesn’t also sell tickets for a living, apparently.)
Noisy Creek’s initiative marks a dramatic and one hopes promising turnabout from a year ago, when staffers warned that the Reader faced “imminent closure.” Staff had volunteered to take furloughs or temporary pay cuts to stem job losses and keep the paper alive. The job cuts continued throughout 2025, according to a note published at the end of the year, with eight more people lost to “a combination of layoffs, buyouts and resignations.”
The Reader took a hiatus by skipping print in January 2026 in anticipation of a switch to a monthly schedule, with a promise the paper would return “shiny and thicc — exactly as a free and freaky paper should be.”
Founded in 1971, the Reader has been on a precarious footing for most of the last 20 years. In 2007 the Reader was sold to Creative Loafing, which filed for bankruptcy scarcely a year later. A hedge fund plucked the company out of insolvency before the publication was acquired by the parent company of the Chicago Sun-Times in 2012. Noisy Creek is taking over from a non-profit organization called The Reader Institute for Community Journalism.
Aside from its award winning coverage of local politics, culture and exposés of police torture that energized a movement for reform, the Reader has longed championed Chicago’s house music and electronic music producers — nearly alone among the city’s print news outlets. Hopefully that doesn’t change.
