San Diego Reader

History

The first issue of the San Diego Reader came out on October 4, 1972. The 12-page black-and-white tabloid was laid out on the dining room table of a 1-bedroom apartment on Mission Boulevard in Mission Beach, and 20,000 copies were printed at Western Offset on State and Market streets.

Copies were delivered to central San Diego, beaches, and college campuses.

Among the early writers for the paper were Kathleen Woodward (ex-wife of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward); Jonathan Saville, literature professor at UCSD; Eleanor Widmer, who taught at UCSD and San Diego State; Jeff Weinstein, who went on to review restaurants at the Village Voice; Connie Bruck, who later wrote for the New Yorker; Duncan Shepherd, a graduate student in visual arts at UCSD; Jeff Smith, a graduate student in literature at UCSD.

Since 1972 the Reader has grown to nearly 200 pages and 160,000 papers are distributed each week.

The offices of the paper moved to India and Date streets in the Little Italy section of downtown San Diego in the summer of 1989.

The paper went to a short tabloid (from 17" tall to 14" tall) with spot color in 1998, to trimmed, stapled, and 4-color in 2002, and to glossy cover in 2004. A bound cover was introduced with the first issue of 2010.

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