San Diego Reader - Notable Contributors, Reporters, and Writers

Notable Contributors, Reporters, and Writers

Julia Davis is a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, an executive member of Women In Film, a member of the Screen Actors Guild, a member of the Independent Filmmakers Alliance and a member of Film Independent. As a contributing writer for the San Diego Reader, she has authored several articles, including Murder in Las Vegas.

Richard Meltzer is a music critic whose first book, The Aesthetics of Rock, was one of the earliest rock-focused literary efforts. In the 1980s, while writing for the Reader chain, Meltzer’s articles for the L.A. Reader on the ugliest buildings in Los Angeles were later published as a book. He moved to Portland, Oregon in the 1990s, but continued contributing to the San Diego Reader, mostly music columns and autobiographical stories. He was also a regular columnist for Addicted to Noise, and by 2004 he was a contributor to a new weekly, Los Angeles CityBeat.

Paul Williams is an American music journalist and writer. Williams created the first national US magazine of rock music criticism Crawdaddy! in January 1966.

Duncan Shepherd is a longtime film critic whose pithy, incisive, and very often negative reviews began running in the San Diego Reader on November 2, 1972, continuing through the November 10, 2010 issue, where he announced his retirement. Originally, Shepherd had no rating system, but he was persuaded to institute a four star system, later expanding that to five. Five-star reviews have become rare: only two movies since 2000 have received the highest rating: Mystic River (2003) and Stevie (2002). Less than 100 films are listed as 5-star films, while nearly 2,000 have had the black spot, his lowest rating, bestowed upon them.

David Elliott is a longtime film critic who replaced Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader as of the November 17, 2010 edition. He spent around 24 years as a columnist for the city’s rival newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, before going to work for the Reader. He has also written for the Chicago Daily News (until 1978), the Chicago Sun-Times (until 1982), USA Today (until 1984), and SDNN.com (until 2010). According to his debut Reader column in November, Elliott cites his favorite movies as including Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy, Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, The Godfather, The Seven Samurai, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the westerns of Budd Boetticher and Buster Keaton comedies. He departed from the San Diego Reader after a final column in the June 13, 2012 issue.

Jay Allen Sanford is an author and cartoonist best known for his work with Revolutionary Comics and Carnal Comics. He co-created the comic book Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics with Todd Loren in 1989, which is still being published in 2012 by Bluewater Productions. The publishing company he founded, Carnal Comics, is known for launching the movie and cartoon character Demi the Demoness. His Reader comic strip "Overheard in San Diego" was launched in late 1995, while a second weekly Reader strip, "Famous Former Neighbors" debuted in 2002. Both reality-based strips are still running. Besides writing several full-length cover features per year (many autobiographical), his other columns for the paper have included "Blurt", "Lists", "URLwatching", "Record Release Roundup", "Most Downloaded", the magazine's online "Local Music Database", and the daily entertainment and pop culture blogs "Rock Around the Town", "Jam Session", "Big Screen", "Fiction Writer", "Autobiography Channel", and "Out and About".

Rick Geary is a cartoonist and graphic novel writer best known for his contributions to the Heavy Metal and National Lampoon magazines. The National Cartoonist Society awarded Geary its Magazine and Book Illustration Award in 1994. At the San Diego Reader, he has been illustrating the staff-written advice and trivia column "Straight From the Hip"— aka "Ask Matthew Alice" – since the late seventies, as well as contributing spot illustrations throughout the newspaper.

Colin Flaherty was a contributor to the San Diego Reader from 1990 to 1994. His story on the unjust conviction of Kelvin Wiley resulted in Wiley's release from Soledad prison, and was featured on Court TV. He was named top political reporter by the San Diego Press Club.

Mary Leary is a poet, performer, and journalist who published and edited seminal New Wave/alternative music & arts 'zine (the) Infiltrator in Washington, D.C., in the late '70s and early '80s. She did several radio shows at WGTB FM, along with djing in Washington, D.C.-area clubs. She has contributed to My Old Kentucky Blog, San Diego Sidewalk, The Washington Tribune, San Diego Entertainer, Blurt Magazine, Daggerzine, and other journals and online magazines. Her poetry has been featured in a number of journals and anthologies, including those of the New York City-based Unbearables, an anthology of women writing about baseball called Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend (Faber & Faber), and a collection about the Obama election, A Dream in the Clouds. She began writing about music for the San Diego Reader in 2009 after programming music and organizing poetry and music performances for Art Site, El Campo Ruse and Lestat's. Her spoken word/music performances have been featured at the Adams Avenue Street Fair, at Woodbury University, on the Lounge radio show, at the Northwest Singer-Songwriter Showcase, and in numerous other settings.

Bart Mendoza is a musician and journalist who has written for numerous publications, including San Diego’s Axcess Magazine and local editions of The Reader and San Diego CityBeat, as well as The San Diego Union and its weekly arts insert Night & Day. National publications include the second series of Crawdaddy!. International publications he has contributed to include British Time Out Guides for Southern California and the Spanish rock magazine Ansia De Color. He has also penned liner notes for recording artists including Phil Angeloff, Ray Brandes, Ryan Ferguson and The Lolas and music compilations such as This is Mod Volume 6, from Cherry Red Records.

Eleanor Widmer scoured San Diego in search of culinary treasures for the Reader from 1974 to 2000. Often disdaining established and chain restaurants, she gravitated to obscure and new eateries, sometimes adopting the nickname "Aunt Bertha" for her more contentious reviews. She carried her Reader food critic career over into radio and television in the 1980s and 1990s, on KPBS-FM radio and at KNSD-TV 39, where she answered callers' questions on restaurants and foods. Widmer, who frequently donned wigs to preserve her critic's anonymity on food-themed television shows, died November 8, 2004, at Scripps Health Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, at the age of 80.

Jerry Schad authored the book Afoot and Afield in San Diego County, published by Wilderness Press in 1986 and widely considered one of the most comprehensive guides to public hiking lands in San Diego county. An instructor of astronomy at Mesa College, Schad was trained in physics and astronomy at UC Berkeley and at San Diego State University. He began writing the "Roam-O-Rama" outdoors column for the Reader in 1993, maintaining it weekly until shortly before his passing (related to cancer) on September 22, 2011.

Steve Esmedina wrote his first story for the Reader in July 1973; his last story appeared in September 1994. Having written for the paper about popular music and film, mostly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Esmedina died on June 24, 2001.

Linda Nevin was an editor and writer for the Reader for over thirty years. As fictional columnist "Matthew Alice," she wrote the "Straight From the Hip" column for over twenty years, until mid-2012, though the public was never made aware of the columnist's true identity. Nevin died on February 15, 2013, though the column still continues with a new (and unknown) "Matthew Alice" at the helm.

Cathy Scott, crime author and journalist, was a contributing reporter in the early 1990s.