San Diego Reader - Background

Background

Specializing in feature stories, the Reader covers San Diego life in general, with emphasis on politics and the arts and entertainment. The Reader also publishes listings of movies, events, theater and music, restaurant and film reviews, and free classified advertisements for its readers. Its "City Lights" section contains short investigative reports into the dealings of the city, while the "Calendar" section highlights local society, things to do, places to eat, and the local music scene. Beginning November 2, 1972, film critic Duncan Shepherd has written the Reader's movie reviews.

Notable cover stories have included in-depth overviews chronicling San Diego history and pop culture, such as Before It Was the Gaslamp: Downtown’s Grindhouse Theater Row in the ‘70s, Gompers School Takes a Bow, The Rise and Fall of San Diego’s Pacific Comics, Pussycat Theaters – a Comprehensive History of a California Dynasty, Field of Screens: San Diego Drive-In Theater History 1947–2008, and Africans, Asians, Hispanics, and Hipsters: Changes in City Heights. The March 28, 2012 cover feature People Will Tell You That You're Late and You'll Hate Them for It., with confessions of a San Diego USPS mail carrier, earned national coverage on TV programs like 20/20 (U.S. TV series).

The paper has also become increasingly known for its local political coverage, due in no small part to the addition of columnist Don Bauder to the staff. Bauder become financial editor and columnist for the daily San Diego Union paper in 1973. When the Union and rival Tribune merged in the early 1990s, he remained at that post; in 1995, he was named senior columnist at the Union-Tribune. In 1985 and 1986, Bauder wrote Captain Money and the Golden Girl, a book about a local San Diego Ponzi scheme which stayed on the L.A. Times best-seller list for more than two months. He retired from the U-T in March 2003 and began writing his weekly column for the Reader in April 2003. He started his blog Scam Diego in September 2007, regularly engaging so many local readers that the comment section frequently racks up to a hundred or more comment posts for each blog post.

Among the Reader’s political and sociological cover features are Soho VS Developers: What’s Worth Saving in San Diego, Obama Taps Alan Bersin to Cover the Border, It’s Getting Ugly Downtown, What’s Wrong With Balboa Park?, San Diego’s Secret Missile Testing Sites, and a whistleblowing feature Just Save My Life, exposing how clinic trials of an experimental blood substitute called PolyHeme were being conducted on city medical patients without their knowledge.

Beginning around 2003, a political comic strip also began running in the paper, "Obermeyer’s Cut," by Neal Obermeyer. Other well-known comic artists who've served as staffers include Jim Cornelius, who illustrated Matthew Alice's longrunning "Straight From the Hip" column from the earliest issues until being replaced by Rick Geary in the later 1970s, as well as famed surf artist and California landscape painter Jeff Yeomans (whose wall murals on San Diego buildings included the Unicorn Trading Company on India Street) and Revolutionary Comics Managing Editor Jay Allen Sanford.

In the editorial staff, the paper’s longtime editor Judith Moore was an American author and essayist best known for her 2005 book Fat Girl: A True Story, published by Hudson Street Press. Joining the Reader staff in 1983 and subsequently known as “Mother Reader” for many years, she specialized in book reviews (especially food writing) and offbeat, whimsical feature subjects. Once, she visited a San Diego sausage factory and described it in lurid detail, in order to test the cliché that no one wanted to see sausage being made. She mentored dozens of writers still contributing to the paper to this day. Moore died of colon cancer after three years of treatment in May 2006. A memorial feature about Miss Moore written by several staffers ran August 16, 2007, called She Hated Adverbs.

The paper's local music coverage reportedly earns some of its heaviest website traffic, including columns and staff blogs like "Blurt", "Lists", "Musician Interviews", "Record Release Roundup", "Here's the Deal" (local venue reviews), "Rock Around the Town," "Jam Session," and "Out and About." The magazine's massive online "Local Music Database" chronicles the histories of over 4,000 San Diego bands and 10,000 local musicians, from the 1940s through today, with discographies, biographies, interviews, article links, videos, and playable MP3s. The music section comic strip "Overheard in San Diego" has been running since late 1995, spinning off an omnibus book collection in 2012 containing over 700 strips.

With an average of over 220 pages each week, the Reader is reportedly the largest alternative publication in the nation. It is the second-largest circulation newspaper in San Diego, currently claiming a single-issue circulation of 170,000 and a 4-week readership of over 777,000 adults.

As a free publication with high circulation figures, the Reader generates high advertising revenue. A quarter-page color ad can cost as much as $3,000 for a single run.

Editor and publisher Jim Holman, a conservative Catholic who also publishes the online California Catholic Daily, has reportedly spent more than $5 million of his own money on three separate ballot measures (Props. 73, 85 and 4) that would require a doctor to notify the parents of a minor female before performing an abortion. The most recent measure, Prop. 4, which would have amended the state constitution, was defeated 52 percent to 48 percent on Nov. 4, 2008.