The Chicago Reader, or Reader (stylized as ЯEADER), is an American alternative weekly newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a group of friends from Carleton College. The Reader is recognized as a pioneer among alternative weeklies for both its creative nonfiction and its commercial scheme. Richard Karpel, then-executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, wrote: [T]he 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, a cornerstone of today's alternative papers. The Reader also developed a new kind of journalism, ignoring the news and focusing on everyday life and ordinary people. After being owned by same four founders since 1971, by the early 2000s profits and readership of the Reader were dropping, and ownership changed several times between 2007 and 2018. In 2022 the owners transferred the Reader to a new non-profit organization, the Reader Institute for Community Journalism. On June 22, 2020, the Reader, citing a 90% drop in advertising revenue due to COVID-19 shutdowns, announced that it was pivoting from a weekly to a biweekly print schedule, with a renewed focus on digital content and storytelling and a refreshed special issues calendar. The Reader is dated every other Thursday and distributed free on Wednesday and Thursday via street boxes and cooperating retail outlets. , the paper claimed to have nearly 1,200 locations in the Chicago metropolitan area and circulation of 60,000. Publication history 1971–1995 The Chicago Reader was founded by Robert A. Roth, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. His ambition was to start a weekly publication for young Chicagoans like Boston's The Phoenix and Boston After Dark. Those papers were sold on newsstands but were also given away, mostly on campuses, to bolster circulation. Roth believed that 100-percent free circulation would work better, and he persuaded several friends from Carleton College, including Robert E. McCamant, Thomas J. Rehwaldt and Thomas K. Yoder, to join him in his venture. They scraped together about $16,000 in capital and published the first issue, 16 pages, on October 1, 1971. One year later, in its first anniversary issue, the Reader published an article titled "What Kind of Paper is This, Anyway?" in which it answered "Questions we've heard over and over