For decades, alt-weeklies like the San Diego Reader were a city's rebellious voice, digging into local politics, covering underground arts and publishing stories no one else would. But their survival depended on classified ads and print advertising, both of which were decimated by Craigslist and the rise of digital media. Now, one by one, these once-essential papers are vanishing. As the Reader ends its print run, we look at what their disappearance means for local journalism.
"They were irreverent. They were conversational. They had a point of view, but they also had a way of looking at the news of the day from a different angle because they knew they had to be different," said Scott Lewis of Voice of San Diego. Lewis began his career writing for an alt-weekly in Salt Lake City, Utah.
"And so I think it's demise as a print product — as something that was available, especially the music stuff — it's a bummer to think that these major cities are now going to continue, maybe forever, without that staple of the coffee shops. That thing you could pick up to look at what's coming up, just to have. Print products were the original mobile, right? That's what you could carry with you — and now it's gone."
Guests:
- Matthew Lickona, owner and editor in chief of San Diego Reader
- Jim Holman, founder of San Diego Reader
- Scott Lewis, CEO and editor in chief of Voice of San Diego
- Jesse Munyoki, KPBS student assistant and host of KCR's DaCulture
Voice of San Diego is a nonprofit news partner of KPBS in our Public Matters series.
Alt-weekly reads:
- "Fifty years of the Reader's best stories" by San Diego Reader authors
- "Tam Hoang, Coronado teacher, recounts his voyage to English" by Tam Hoang
- "Loma Portal and Midway District during WWII - a walking tour" by Margot Sheehan
- "Why Elizabeth Smart Became a Household Name" by Scott Lewis
- "San Diego Orchids & Onions winners, 20 years later" by Matthew Lickona
- "Marilyn Monroe will always be in Coronado" by Matthew Lickona
- "Trailblazing without a screen" by Julia Dixon Evans
- "'We're Gonna Make It': Bob Rabbit Transforms His Beats Into a Heroic Mission" by Anthony Wallace
Matthew Lickona's reading list:
- "Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories" by Joseph Mitchell
- "The Pump House Gang" by Tom Wolfe
- "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
- "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe
- "The White Album" by Joan Didion
Mentioned in this episode:
- Craigslist | Online classifieds site launched in 1995, with a San Diego edition added in 2000, known for its no-frills design and endless odd finds
- La Pensione Hotel | European-style boutique hotel in San Diego's Little Italy
- Bob Roth | Founder of the Chicago Reader, the influential alt-weekly he launched in 1971
- Rotten Tomatoes | Movie and TV review site launched in 1998 that distills critical consensus into one score
- Gonzo Report | Recurring column in the San Diego Reader delivering boots-on-the-ground dispatches from San Diego's music scene and beyond
- Blockbuster | Video rental giant that ruled living rooms from its 1985 founding through the early 2000s
- Ernie Grimm | Former managing editor of the San Diego Reader, recruited alongside Matthew Lickona by the paper
- KCR College Radio | Student-run San Diego State University station broadcasting indie, punk and campus voices
- Burn All Books' Mail Mag | Subscription-based zine mailing packed with art, poetry and writing from BAB and friends, sent via postal mail each month
- Substack | Newsletter platform that gives writers a new way to publish and get paid
- The New Yorker | Esteemed magazine known for longform journalism, fiction, and sharp cultural commentary.
- The Atlantic | Influential publication offering in-depth reporting and essays on politics, culture, and American life.
- Hotel del Coronado | Iconic beachfront hotel known for its ghost lore, Victorian design and as the filming location for 1959's "Some Like It Hot" starring Marilyn Monroe
Sources:
- "Are alt-weeklies dying or just moving online?" (Kristen Hare, Poynter, 2017)
- "No One's Sure What the New CityBeat Will Look Like" (Julia Dixon Evans, Voice of San Diego, 2019)
- "San Diego Reader ends print edition after 52 years" (Julia Dixon Evans, KPBS, 2025)
- "TV Guide Magazine is sold for the third time in less than 10 years to NTVB Media" (Stephen Battaglio, Los Angeles Times, 2015)
- "Reader's Digest changes hands" (InPublishing, 2018)
- "Creative Destruction: Out With the Old, in With the New" (Carol M. Kopp, Investopedia, 2023)
From KPBS Public Media, The Finest is a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or click the play button at the top of this page and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Pandora, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode 6: San Diego Reader Transcript
Julia Dixon Evans: Alt-weeklies are the free magazines you see at coffee shops or those racks on the sidewalk. They cover underground arts and culture and tackle news with a fresh voice. Alt-weeklies have won several Pulitzers and have played a big role in journalism — and the country — over the past 60 years or so.
Scott Lewis: Every major city had these and they were all important. And they were so fun. They were irreverent. They were conversational. They had a point of view. But they also had a way of looking at the news of the day from a different angle because they knew they had to be different. And that's what alt-weeklies at their best did.
Evans: That's Scott Lewis, editor in chief of Voice of San Diego. Like so many writers, he got his start at an alt-weekly. So did I. So did Jonathan Gold, the legendary L.A. food writer, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the influential critic of white supremacy.
But alt-weeklies are disappearing fast. In 2009, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia had 135 member publications. Less than a decade later, that number had shrunk to just 108.
San Diego CityBeat folded in 2019. Now, our last remaining alt-weekly, the San Diego Reader, is going out of print after 52 years. But one man, Matthew Lickona, is determined to keep the Reader alive, online, for as long as possible.
Matthew Lickona: I took a bigger pay cut than I'd like to talk about on camera to try to keep this going. It's very much what I love and what I will do if I possibly can.
Evans: One thing alt-weeklies are known for is what's called longform literary journalism — longer stories and articles written with a certain flair or personality. Just like alt-weeklies themselves, it's kind of a dying art today. Matthew got hooked on longform writing when he was a teenager.
Lickona: I had a writing bug from way back. I had picked up a copy of Joseph Mitchell's "Up in the Old Hotel," which was a collection of his profiles from The New Yorker magazine back in the '30s up through the '60s and that was sort of my, this is what's possible with profile writing, the way you just get these people to talk and talk and give you a whole world just by these long strands of conversation. And I thought that was a dream.
Evans: Matthew's been writing these kinds of stories for the Reader since the '90s, when he was recruited right out of college. It's a dream job, and it's the only real job he's ever had. That person who recruited him was Jim Holman, who ran the Reader for the last 52 years.
At its height, from the late '80s to the 2000s, they printed up to 160,000 copies a week with many issues topping 200 pages. The Reader had an apartment in Coronado and flew in influential writers from across the country to stay there just to write cover stories. They were a force in San Diego's cultural scene. But Craigslist, COVID and the explosion of a million other online media alternatives wore down the business. And now, at 78, Jim has run out of steam.
Jim Holman: So finally at the end of last year, I thought, you know, this was a really tough year, and I went to my business manager, my sales manager. And I said, you want to buy the paper? I'll give it to you for free. And he said, no, I don't want it because I'm in debt myself.
Evans: That's when Matthew stepped in.
Holman: And I was telling it to Matt Lickona and there was a long silence.
And I said, what? Are you interested? And he said, I so much want this to survive.
Evans: Matthew bought the paper from Jim for $1. When you buy a business for a single dollar, you typically take on its debt and liabilities. It's definitely not risk free, but it can pay off. In the last 20 years, both TV Guide Magazine and Reader's Digest U.K. sold for a single dollar, and pound, respectively. And both were turned around and sold for a profit a few years later. So now it's Matthew's challenge to pull off that kind of improbable comeback, and sustain an alt-weekly in what is increasingly a post-alt-weekly world.
From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest. A podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.
[Theme Music]
Evans: I went with our producer Anthony to visit Matthew and Jim at the Reader's Golden Hill office, just days before they had to finish moving out.
Lickona: Hello!
Evans: Hey, Jim?
Lickona: No, I'm Matt.
Evans: Oh, nice to meet you.
Lickona: I've aged 20 years in the past week, so I look like Jim.
Anthony Wallace: Hi, I'm Anthony.
Jim Holman: Hi.
Wallace: Nice to meet you.
Holman: You're seeing the demise.
Evans: Even though they'll keep publishing online, they've got to cut every expense they can. Printing and office space are the big ones. On the day we visited, Matthew called the place a mausoleum. In the back room, floor-to-ceiling black cardboard filing cabinets are stuffed with something like 2,600 distinct issues of the Reader, which they desperately need to find a home for.
Lickona: This is the reader archive room. This is all 52 plus years of the Reader. Yeah, it's all here. And I've reached out to a bunch of the libraries, the academic libraries around town, and had a few nibbles. But high hopes that it will find a home because I think it's a pretty valuable resource.
Evans: We did some math and those cabinets contain tens of millions of words documenting what's happened in San Diego over the past five decades.
So I'm looking at the issue, February 16, 1989. It is thick. It looks like a newspaper, not a magazine.
Lickona: This is the 200-page era. Two twenty-four was our biggest issue ever. These are the fat years.
Wallace: Can I take a look at that?
Lickona: Please.
Evans: We had a lot of fun going through the filing cabinets, sampling issues from every decade.
Oh, here's an article: It's called, "What we do now is disco." This illustration…
Wallace: It's a really cool illustration.
Evans: It really is.
Wallace: There's a story about how a North County Denny's allegedly serves up racial epithets along with its low priced cuisine. Denny's employees were using racial slurs. Review of a theater performance… I mean, 220 pages a week is like they're covering everything that's happening — there's nothing falling through the cracks with this.
Evans: Even if you've never picked up a copy of the Reader or regardless of what you thought of it, there's no denying that this archive really is an incredible time capsule of the city.
Lickona: I wrote when we did our 50th anniversary issue, and I wrote a little intro at the beginning of that saying that a lot of identity is memory. Memory is what makes an anybody into a somebody, and this here is a memory of San Diego that was available to the whole city that asked and answered every week the question: What's it like in San Diego?
Evans: Jim Holman launched the first issue of the San Diego Reader in October of 1972.
Holman: The Reader was started as what they call an alternative paper, and it was independent in the sense that we didn't owe anybody anything. We wouldn't have any super large advertisers, so that gave us freedom — freedom of speech, complete freedom of expression.
San Diego was a town, when we started, that mainly had just the Union Tribune, San Diego Magazine and some community papers. There was nothing quite like the Reader. So, our niche was, I would say, largely cultural. We had a lot of music and movies.
And the first five years were very precarious. I was borrowing money from all kinds of people to try to make it work. Finally, after three years, I think it was, we started to break even.
Evans: And after those touch and go first few years, they did much more than just break even. Jim made a counterintuitive decision that paid off in a huge way. Like a lot of alt-weeklies around the country, the Reader ran classified ads. You could list a used dresser or a spare room you were trying to rent. It was Craigslist before Craigslist. But instead of charging for those classifieds like everyone else at the time, Jim made them free. Both placing ads and picking up the paper itself cost San Diegans nothing. And that made the Reader huge. The value of the regular advertisements went way up.
Holman: The great thing about the Reader was because we had free circulation and free classifieds, we creamed everybody. The Union Tribune, anybody else in town — nobody could beat us. You can see the paper out there. We had hundreds of classified ads. I mean, thousands, maybe classified ads every single week given to us by people. We killed it because the papers would fly off the counters every week. They'd be gone in 12 hours everywhere in town. And that was 160,000. So it was not just the numbers, but a very committed readership.
Evans: They did music, movie and restaurant reviews and all kinds of local news stories. They also got tangled up in their fair share of local politics and controversy, but Jim's thing was those longer essay-like stories. That's what he championed in the Reader.
Holman: So when I say longform, we have run stories that have been 20,000 words.
Evans: Wow!
Holman: And there's a small market for that. The stories have to be very good and compelling, so you finish the story. But I use at the same time literary, because what I mean is good writing. And Bob Roth, the publisher of the Chicago Reader — where we got our idea from — used to say, the purpose of the Chicago Reader is good writing, pure and simple.
Wallace: If you had to choose, what's your favorite story that you've ever done?
Holman: You know what my favorite story is? It was the Vietnamese kid who talked about his learning of English. He was a high school teacher at Coronado, and a white parent got him suspended over there because his student, his son didn't get a good grade or something, and we were outraged. And I knew he was a really good English teacher, so I asked him to come and write for us.
And he wrote this amazing story about learning English from a Vietnamese point of view. And it's such a beautiful tour de force. And after he wrote that story, I got a call from a literary agent in New York who wanted more of his work. And I thought, yeah, he's very good.
Evans: Remember those free classifieds? The beginning of the end for the Reader, and pretty much all the alt-weeklies, came when those ads moved online.
Holman: We grew little by little by little, and there was never any trouble until Craigslist. But Craigslist was the symbol of online reality because once people could go online, that killed the classified ads and then everything else pretty much had the same problem, that you could get almost every other piece of information. And people weren't that discriminating. They could find, I don't know, Rotten Tomatoes or something else.
Evans: Did you ever consider selling to a bigger company?
Holman: No way. No, I hate corporate America. I like small businesses.
Evans: The Reader's page count shrank from over 200 to under 100 and, after COVID, to around 40 pages. Circulation dropped by about 80%, too. But all along — even in its prime — the Reader had its critics, many who saw it as conservative. Scott Lewis of Voice of San Diego has a complicated relationship with the Reader, which he says is based on how they would call out his publication.
Lewis: It had a different take in general too. Alternative in a way was kind of conservative and also just very conspiratorial. Frankly, I had a lot of trouble with it, mostly because they would constantly attack me and what I was doing without ever having the courage to call us or something. So it was a weird thing, and I think it spawned competitors. CityBeat started, 18 years ran. But the Reader was a big deal. People read it even if they said they didn't. I think it's still important. It has a wonderful music section and a lot of value.
Evans: On one hand, there's the extensive weekly music and arts coverage you don't always get with traditional news. But also, there's those long stories. Twenty-thousand words is long. That's almost a small book. Even 5,000 words in print would take you a good 20 minutes to read. These stories are rare today. At Voice of San Diego, Scott says they will go over 2,000 words for an exceptionally written story. But he acknowledges that a long alt-weekly piece can have a big impact, including one from the Reader that still sticks with him.
Lewis: They did a story a couple decades ago about the history of the Frontier neighborhood in Point Loma in the Sports Arena area. Where the Sports Arena is now, used to be a neighborhood. And I read that, and now with the discussion now about the future of the Sports Arena, it forced me to spend a few weeks doing my own work and doing an update, in a way, of that story. I can honestly say that piece changed my entire perspective on San Diego. And I valued it tremendously.
It's nice to have a forum for those things and I think that's what's unfortunate is that that 2,000-, 3,000-, 4,000-word piece in an alt-weekly in other cities could change the conversation for weeks about City Hall or about the culture.
Evans: I got my start in journalism writing for an alt-weekly — San Diego CityBeat — with an editor who was willing to give me a shot. I wrote about coffee and hiking trails and eventually, visual art, dance and music. Alt-weeklies have been a real haven for emerging journalists. Like me, our producer Anthony got his start at one. So did Scott Lewis.
Lewis: One of the things that's special about alt-weeklies is that they would take a chance on anybody, regardless of their experience, and they would give you a chance to publish about the most important things, to write about the most pressing things in a city, even as a young, inexperienced journalist or just somebody coming into journalism at an older age. There was so much opportunity. All they cared about in many ways was just getting a different perspective. They would give chances to people who, like me, didn't necessarily deserve it. And I've carried that forward too, like hiring people who maybe hadn't finished college or maybe had been in prison or in different situations because you know that you might get something special. You don't just go with the Columbia grad who was at the top of their class the whole way through. There's always something special to be found if you give somebody a chance. And I'll remember that forever because they gave me a chance.
When I was at the City Weekly, the story I'm still most proud of from Salt Lake City is there was this incredible kidnapping, Elizabeth Smart was taken from her home at night. Every news truck in the world came to Salt Lake City that week, and I remember my editor saying you should go do a story about that, but not the story about that. You need to figure out some other way to do it. And I ended up doing a story about why her kidnapping got more attention than other kidnappings that had happened around the same time.
They taught me, in particular, from the beginning, like, you need to look at stories from a different angle, and that paid me forward in a way I never anticipated a decade later or a few years later when I was trying to build Voice of San Diego because I looked at it and looked, I can't just do what these other news organizations are doing in town. I have to do something different. I was able to lean on that experience. And I think that's where an alt-weekly can really thrive, is to put a different perspective, a different lens on what's happening in a community and force people to deal with that. And that's what they did at their best. And I think the Reader had moments like that.
[Music]
Evans: When he was a teenager, Matthew Lickona started a literary magazine at St. Thomas Aquinas College, a tiny school near Ojai. And it caught Jim's attention at the Reader.
Lickona: I got a call when I was up in college, asking if I wanted to maybe try out being a writer for it and they mailed me up a copy — those were the very fat years — but there are these enormous longform literary journalism stories.
Evans: Jim asked the then 21-year-old Matthew to come down to San Diego, stay at the Hotel Pensione for three months and write the kinds of stories he dreamed about.
Lickona: So we got here, we got given a pile of books: "On the Road," "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," "Pump House Gang," "White Album" by Joan Didion. And then I did weekly meetings with Jim. You'd analyze various writing styles and we'd talk about it. He had me write a piece on the 20th anniversary of our Orchids and Onions Architecture Awards. And so I did that and it was good enough. I'm still here 30 years later.
Evans: If you're thinking this level of opportunity and luxury is what normally happens to young journalists, it's not. And today, this is all just entirely unimaginable.
Lickona: I was very fortunate. A real break, a real break.
Evans: The Reader's not flying writers in to stay at hotels and write stories anymore. Matthew is just trying to keep this institution — that gave him a chance and a career — afloat.
Lickona: I'll say there is a plan. There are really positive signs. Our traffic's actually pretty good. Our newsletter business is booming.
Evans: And you'll continue to have theater reviews…
Lickona: Film reviews, restaurant reviews. Yeah, we do more coverage of local bands, we profile a different one every week and I don't know if anybody else does that thorough a look. And then, Gonzo Report is our attempt to, we don't want to do concert reviews but we want to review what it's like to have been there. Again, what's it like in San Diego? So we'll document the scene, what's the merch, who are the fans, what happened during the show, as opposed to this is how they sound.
Evans: For now, Matthew says the longform stories — what he says make up the heart of the Reader — are going on hiatus, but he hopes he can find a way to bring those back.
In some ways, it feels like Matthew is fighting against gravity. This is really just the way the world works. Things change, old businesses die out and make room for new ones. Economists call it creative destruction. Netflix replaced Blockbuster, laptops replaced typewriters and cars replaced horse-drawn carriages.
Lickona: Ernie Grimm, who was my predecessor in the managing editor spot, would often call us, the very best carriage wheel makers in town in the auto age. We've had a sense of our shrinking of that cultural footprint for some time.
Evans: But new things are never a one-to-one replacement. Sometimes we lose something real. Technically, a lot of things have replaced the alt-weekly: Craigslist took over the classifieds, Rotten Tomatoes replaced local film critics, Instagram became the new way to kill time while waiting for your coffee or laundry. So I asked Matthew, what do we lose without print-edition alt-weeklies?
Lickona: Well, the same thing you lose when you can't browse a bookstore: It's discovery. We know that the online world is working very hard to build a bubble around you because it knows what you've eaten before so it wants to keep feeding you that, and it does a really good job of that, and it's valuable in certain ways. But it's also very easy to get into an ideological silo and it's easy to just miss a lot of the world when this or that bubble becomes yours. And so if you can't, if you're not just happening by and snagging a copy of the Reader, and you go in looking for concert listings and you happen to find — we've got a great poetry column — you find some World War I poet, and maybe it changes things for you. And so the opportunity of discovery is a real loss, I think, when you don't have something you can pick up that way.
Evans: I asked Scott Lewis the same question.
Lewis: The value of an alt-weekly to a community is, I think, uncontestable. It's just wonderful. It can be a really important voice. All these counterculture folks from the '60s formed these alt-weeklies as this alternative voice to the objective, institutional news, newspapers of a community. And they were so fun. They were irreverent. They were conversational. They had a point of view, but they also had a way of looking at the news of the day from a different angle because they knew they had to be different. And so I think its demise as a print product — as something that was available, especially the music stuff — it's a bummer to think that these major cities are going to now continue, maybe forever, without that staple of the coffee shops. That thing you could pick up to look at what's coming up, just to have. Print products are the original mobile, right? That's what you could carry with you — and now it's gone.
Evans: People who lived through the alt-weekly era understand what we're losing without them. But what about young people just coming into adulthood — those who never really had the chance to pick one up? We talked to Jesse Munyoki, a student assistant who works with us at KPBS. We were interested in his take because he's deeply involved in the local music scene. He also works for KCR, SDSU's student-run college radio station. He told us he loves finding shows and bands to promote through physical mediums like fliers. So, we basically described the idea of a printed alt-weekly to him. We were curious whether something like that would still feel useful or exciting to someone in his world.
Jesse Munyoki: I think, for myself, I do like more organic approaches that come through, like physical copies cause online, it just feels like another advertisement, but me stumbling upon, say, a show that's coming up feels more spontaneous, and for my work, it makes the job more exciting because then you're finding organic things that you like and then people recommend to you, and then you check it out, and then you're finding, rather than just copying, pasting something that someone paid for to put on a website. I think the discovery is a nice word to use just because it feels more spontaneous and authentic.
I still feel like having physical paper, it's tangible. You can hold it, you fill the paper, there's a sensory attachment to it, but then I can trace those little magic threads. You can always look back at that as the starting point for when you discovered, say, a new band.
Evans: Do you feel like everything that you want to reach you on TikTok or on social media, do you feel like you're getting it?
Munyoki: Sometimes, but overall, no. Just because I feel like I could be in a season or a time where I'm just liking the same thing, so then the algorithm is gonna feed me, but it's not exactly what I need.
It comes down to funding. If a label is backing you and all these TikToks, and you have an elaborate — you don't just have a ring light in your room, you have studio lights, you're gonna be more attractive to just a scrolling person on TikTok than somebody who's just strumming their guitar with a ring light. You feel a bit discouraged as an artist because you don't feel like either you don't have the time or the financial capabilities to fund the art, or if you're looking for something more authentic, you can get lost in the weeds of, say, industry or just high-intensity content, and then you run into mediocre music.
Evans: The Reader was a physical token of San Diego culture, a source for non-algorithmic discovery. It'll still attempt to serve that in digital form for as long as possible, especially through its music coverage. And zines and other analog media, like Burn All Books' monthly Mail Mag, remain an undercurrent for discovering new things in print formats — the magic threads as Jesse said.
But looking beyond arts and culture coverage and beyond San Diego, without alt-weeklies, where have those longer essays gone? You can find some of it on Substack, or The New Yorker and The Atlantic, but there is almost certainly less of that kind of thing today.
For his very last big print story in the Reader, Matthew wrote an arts and culture article that worked on one level as a light read about what's happening in town, but on another as a metaphor for the Reader's own impending metamorphosis.
Lickona: And it was on the touring Broadway company of "Some Like It Hot" musical coming through town and stopping and doing a little publicity event at the Hotel Del, where, of course, the exterior shots were Marilyn Monroe for the movie version. During that, I sidled up to the mayor of Coronado talking to somebody from the hotel and he's asking, so, how much of the original building is just original? And he said, there's very little here that hasn't been worked on in one way or another. It's always, always about what's next. And then the whole play, of course, has a massive update because by casting a nonbinary character in a show that in the film version was about the humor involved in a dude putting on a dress and pretending to be a girl, they said in the interview, it's not a joke, it's not a trope, it's who I am and how I express myself. So I did that story and put it on the cover because we were going online. There's not much of what's original, everything's been worked on, everything's been always about what's next.
Evans: When we finished our interviews with Matthew and Jim, we spent an hour rifling through the old archives. These thousands of issues aren't just a history of the big events, they also capture the small human moments that make up life in San Diego.
Wallace: This is a profile about a saxophonist, it looks like. Oh, there's a poem called "Patriotics." I think the real thing is the classifieds, right?
Evans: Pets.
Evans and Wallace: Snake for sale.
Wallace: $45. Python. Quite friendly. And loves to eat.
Evans: Oh, and then here's the roommate listings. A single father, age 26, needs angelic, sensitive female to care for little girl, housekeep and cook.
Wallace: Good luck with that.
Evans: Responsible, straight, non-vegetarian. No rock, grass. It's listed first before no drugs. Like, I don't want you addicted to drugs, but I definitely…
Wallace: I need a non-vegetarian, angelic woman.
Evans: Lady with two children needs a ride to Denver around September 30. Lady, don't do that. I want to travel to the past and warn her.
Wallace: There's a letter to someone's parents. Dear Mom and Dad, right off, I'll bet you're real surprised to hear from me. I think the last time we talked was 1971 when I called from Connecticut to ask for money.
Evans: For now, the Reader's voluminous archive of little moments is still growing. Matthew is hanging on to his horse drawn-carriage wheels, his Blockbuster video store — just not in print form, and he'll do it as long as he possibly can.
Lickona: This has been my professional life since I got out of college in 1995. I love it. I've done most areas on the editorial side of it. And I would hate to see it pass from… just fade out and that can happen pretty easily.
Evans: What are some scenarios that might make you decide to pull the plug? Is this something that you're just not letting yourself accidentally manifest by thinking about?
Lickona: No, no, no. I have to think about it. There's a printer bill that's outstanding that you have to be able to pay all the weeks of because we've been running a few weeks behind for years, and that's OK because you're always going another week. And we were always just about to turn the corner and become a little more stable and start paying off some debts and we ran out of room on that. But I have to think about what happens if we run out of room altogether. And so there's a hard number, and if we get down to that number, it's got to end, but it will not end unless we get there.
[Music]
Evans: A special thanks to Matthew Lickona, Jim Holman, Scott Lewis and Jesse Munyoki for their help with this episode.
You can find pictures from our visit to the Reader archives and links to some of the stories and sources we mentioned at our website at KPBS.org/TheFinest.
Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe, leave a rating and share it with your friends.
We're off next week, but in two weeks, we'll drop our first bonus episode, where you can get a little behind-the-scenes insight with The Finest team about what's inspiring us and how we make the show.
Chrissy Nguyen: The other day we were doing an interview and somebody mentioned that this piece was created by a piñata artist. Have you ever thought about the person behind it? To hear those stories, like how do you become a piñata artist? I think that's one of the things that I'm excited to explore more of.
Evans: The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. Our audio engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.