
The Chicago Reader has announced restructuring and layoffs and is facing an “imminent risk of closure.”
The weekly newspaper and website — one of the last of the alternative weeklies that once flourished in American cities — self-reported on the turmoil at the company in a post on Wednesday January 15.
A combination of “financial losses, operational challenges, and external pressures” have resulted in the immediate layoff of six non-union employee staff positions. The layoffs were “spurred by an urgent need to reduce costs in order to avoid organizational closure.”
Philip Montoro posted on Bluesky that he and more than a dozen of his colleagues had “volunteered to take furloughs or temporary pay cuts” to stem job losses in the paper’s editorial department.
Founded in 1971, the Chicago Reader was among the most influential of the alternative weeklies, on par with the Village Voice and it’s one-time sister publication in Washington, City Paper. John Conroy’s articles on police torture “did more, perhaps, than anyone in the paper’s fine lineup of writers to put the Reader on the map of serious journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review wrote in 2010. Conroy began covering the story of Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge’s “House of Screams” in 1989 and continued on Burge’s trail of torture and coerced confessions until his conviction in 2010.
The paper is also one of the few outfits that covered house music seriously prior to 2005 (music sections at the city’s dailies frequently had to bring in freelance writers to credibly cover anything outside of pop and rock). With knowledgeable staff like Leor Galil, the Reader‘s coverage of the local dance music scene matured further in the last decade, turning up some really amazing stories about the city’s house music tradition and the people that made it given front-page coverage. For example: this profile of scene and public access TV legend Marcus Mixx.
In 2007 the Reader was sold to Creative Loafing, which filed for bankruptcy a year later. In 2012, the Reader was acquired by the parent company of the Chicago Sun-Times, putting the paper at risk during a chaotic era for media and alternative weeklies in general, and Chicago media in particular.
The current owner is a non-profit organization called the Reader Institute for Community Journalism. The RICJ’s CEO, Solomon Lieberman, resigned this week, the Reader announced.
The Reader has outlined a “path forward” which includes plans for increased donor outreach and crowdfunding campaigns. The paper is accepting one-time and monthly donations now at chicagoreader.com/donate.