The pale-pastel forty-seven-year-old forty-page paper may rise above the waves after all. After the Sun-Times reached an agreement in June to pass the venerable alt-weekly standing to an ownership group led by Chicago Crusader publisher Dorothy Leavell, questions about its future direction hung in the air. Nothing happened as quickly as the February firing of Mark Konkol, editor of the Reader while the paper was still under Sun-Times ownership, sparked by its racially inflammatory cover illustration of JB Pritzker sitting atop a black lawn jockey statue. The first of two auspicious moves by the Reader’s new ownership came in September, with the hiring of veteran Windy City Times publisher Tracy Baim, followed in October by the naming of author, cultural critic and investigative comics journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore as editor. “My interests in investigative reporting and comics will play a significant role, but I guarantee we won’t abandon the cultural coverage the paper’s built on,” Moore told journalism blogger Robert Feder in October. Moore’s books include “Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking,” “Body Horror” and the forthcoming “Sweet Little Cunt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucet.” (Ray Pride)
Best of Chicago 2018