What really happened at the Reader?
In 2018, the Chicago Reader was insolvent. I partnered with real estate developer Elzie Higginbottom to purchase the Reader for $1. We assumed its debt and helped pay its operating expenses with the intention of transitioning the paper to a nonprofit status to stabilize it.
In 2019, I wrote a column for the Reader titled, “Why the Reader is worth saving.” This became a monthly column. Taking advantage of the Reader’s 50-year history of embracing dissent, I focused on subjects that might not be welcome in mainstream papers. I didn’t buy the Reader to write a column, as some have said, but to save the paper and jobs.
Last November, I wrote a column expressing concern about my 6-year-old daughter receiving an mRNA vaccine. Like all my columns, it was fact-checked and edited. My editor thanked me for taking on the difficult topic and pronounced my research to be “bulletproof.” But after publication, following an uproar, Reader management hired an anonymous fact checker to rewrite my column and issue a report with nine points of disagreement, later expanded to 15.
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The publisher offered me two options: remove the column from the Reader website or replace it with the new version that was extensively modified, to be followed by the fact checker report. I asked to publish a response to the report, which I disagreed with, and was told: “Your side is the actual column. The rebuttal is not a ‘side.’ It is a fact-checker’s report.”
Concerned about censorship, the Reader board passed a resolution in December enshrining protections for free speech as the paper moved to nonprofit status. Another stipulation involved equal representation on the nonprofit board for people on the side of free speech and dissent.
Reader management ignored the duly passed board resolution. Instead, they demonized and pressured me to sign off on the transition without the protections.
In the April 15 op-ed “Len Goodman should let the Chicago Reader embrace its nonprofit future,” Reader writers demanded that I “stop playing games … and do what’s right.” But their anger is misplaced. This stalemate could have been resolved months ago if management would have talked to the board.
Instead of protesting outside my house, they should tell their bosses to engage with the board, so that the Reader can transition to the nonprofit model everyone embraces.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/letters/ct-letters-vp-042022-20220419-3un45pso6ze5vlkrz53iectpwq-story.html
