San Diego Reader Redesigns; Another Cover Story by a Blogger, this time Barbarella

Whoa. The San Diego Reader, San Diego’s free alternative newsweekly for more than 20 years (I can’t tell from their site how old the paper is) has undergone a redesign.

The home page of their site has better readability and clarity than it did. (See cached versions at the google cache and wayback machine). They also have a listing of things that are “Coming”:

Coming: Ask Saffron, Best Buys, CD Reviews, Classical Music, Crasher, Driven, It’s a Crime, Kid Stuff, Local CD reviews, Lover’s Lane, Nightspotting: Club reviews, Poetry, Puzzle, Reading, Sheep & Goats, Sporting Box

This is hopeful to me. They seem to have a new emphasis on putting more of their content on the web. You may remember this blog as complimenting them on adding RSS feeds for concerts and noting when they reposted Brian Dear’s blogging as a cover story.

On the content side, their latest cover story was penned by local blogger Barbarella. Oso talks more about this in another post.

I find it cool that San Diego Bloggers I have catalogued have been recognized, and paid for their writing. But it’s puzzling that I have yet to be contacted. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, the saying goes.

Since I moved back to San Diego in 1999, The Reader, online and off, has been maddening to me. So much of their content is not online, and the paper version is ad-filled and content-lite. Worst, their cover stories were not on the web. How can you engage in an online discussion when none of the content is online? To be on the web you have to BE on the web, as The New York Times has learned.

It seems to me that by hiring bloggers to write for them, they’re admitting that the energy in the writing community is moving online. I think it’s a smart move for them to be trawling the web for creative writing. Hey, sdbloggers is filled with interesting writing. Sure, much of it is is drivel, but some of it’s darn good.

I first became aware of The Reader when I was in high school — 1983-1987. At that time, The Reader was the events paper. People would dutifully pick it up at their local store, 7-11, library — the Reader managed to be everywhere. Like clockwork, it was there every Thursday. News. Events. Classifieds, Lynda Barry and Life in Hell cartoons, concert listings, Matthew Alice columns. Back then, the format was newsprint tabloid. That’s contrasted with the “jumbo magazine” of today. It was in three separate sections: — a main news section, an entertainment section, and a classified section (where the comics were).

The design was handy, usable, and smart. I remember conversations with my uncle where talked about how indispensible The Reader was. Being able to go directly where I wanted to go was wonderful. If I wanted to see Life in Hell I knew where to go. If I was trying to find out when Mojo Nixon or The Beat Farmers where playing, I knew where to look.

Nowadays, the magazine is a big mound of botox ads and cell phone plans. It’s suffered and prospered with a deluge of advertising. Fahrenheit was trying to be a better Reader, but it died due to lack of ads, supposedly.

But maybe what killed The Reader has been the internet. There are so many great sources of events, news, concert listings, movie reviews online — why bother with The Reader? I mean, I can Google for any information I want.

Speculation: Have the changes going on at The Reader been prompted by this darn internet?

Whoa, no sooner than I wrote this, I checked my RSS Reader and Anil Dash points to a story at Online Journalism Review entitled Online Challengers Roust Alternative Weeklies From Net Slumber. And I forgot entirely about how sites like Craigslist are eating into classified ad revenue, not to mention dating services. My head a splode with thinking about possibilities for online media to kill paper media.

Still you can’t read a website on the toilet. Well, not without some WiFi.