Readers of the San Diego Reader — an alternative press institution for more than 50 years — have seen their last print edition.
Jim Holman, the weekly paper’s founder and editor emeritus, said Saturday that its new owner, longtime staffer Matt Lickona, decided to shut down the thinning product found at nearly 1,000 news racks.
Thursday’s paper was the last.
“I strongly prefer print,” Holman told Times of San Diego, “but it doesn’t make sense.”
He said the paper’s online site (“outperforming our print version”) will continue the same mix of long stories and features, plus news and listings for food, music, theater, movies and events.
Plus the local satirical page “San Diego on the QT.”
Free classifieds will continue as well.
“This week, we are putting stickers on all our street stands directing our print customers to the website,” said Holman, a Coronado resident.
“It’s kind of undeniable that we can’t do print anymore,” with even his own children shunning print for online. “So I sold the Reader [about Jan. 1] to my longtime editor, Matt Lickona.”
The four-decade perch of reviled/revered film critic Duncan Shepherd and investigative reporters including Dorian Hargrove, Don Bauder and Matt Potter, the Reader once boasted 200 pages an issue — half being free classifieds.
Its press run hit a high of 160,000 in the late 1980s but was cut last summer from 45,000 to 25,000, Holman said.
“Many of our advertisers didn’t seem to notice,” he said.
Its latest issue — with Thursday’s cover story on the legacy of the Marilyn Monroe vehicle “Some Like it Hot” shot at the Hotel del Coronado — is 40 pages.
An “older and pretty tired” Holman, 78, says he first offered to sell the paper to his sales manager.
“He said no, he wasn’t ready to do that, and I was telling Matt Lickona this and … there was a long silence. He said, ‘Wait a minute. … I would do anything to keep this alive.'”
But the economic decline of the news industry — especially the emergence of Craigslist gobbling up cash cows in classifieds — led to this week’s folding of a San Diego icon.
Holman plans to write a history of the Golden Hill-based Reader, whose outlines are already online.
“We were on the edge — I mean financially and culturally — for so long,” he said of the publication that celebrated its 50th anniversary in October 2022.
“I started the paper with money I had saved [working] in Vietnam,” Holman said. It took three years to become a viable business. Helping were coupons many readers clipped. (More recently, marijuana ads provided a lot of revenue.)
Several layoffs result from the paper doing dark — staffers in production and distribution.
But he takes heart in booming parts of his online edition, launched in 1998.
“We have more user-submitted events listings” than ever, he said. (The Reader’s 17-year-old YouTube channel boasts hundreds of videos, but most have fewer than 100 views. Its Facebook page has 132,000 followers and X account has 27,000 followers.)
About three or four other people are working for the Reader without pay, he said, adding: “I’m still at it … and I’m glad to do it for free, and so are these other people.”
The paper — once touted as the third-largest alt-weekly in the nation — wasn’t popular with everyone, though.
Writing in Voice of San Diego in 2008, Seth Hettena found the Reader wanting journalistically.
“If a publisher were to show such contempt for his readers, the final product might look a lot like the San Diego Reader,” he said. “Editor and owner Jim Holman doesn’t seem to care about whether anyone actually reads the weekly newspaper he’s been publishing in San Diego for 35 years. Week after week, I pick up the Reader hoping to find something worth reading over a cup of coffee only to fling aside moments later in disappointment.”
Hettena noted Holman’s Christian faith and activism, especially against abortion — a view the Reader didn’t promote.
“Holman is a devout Catholic who has given millions on parent-notification initiatives that seek to compel doctors to notify parents before performing abortions on minors,” Hettena said in a 2,100-word critique.
But Hettena credited Holman for not being afraid to embarrass or challenge the local Catholic Church.
“In 1984, the Reader’s Neal Matthews revealed that Monsignor William Spain was in treatment in Michigan for cocaine addiction following a love affair with a male addict,” he wrote. “Matthews also wrote an exhaustive analysis of the Diocese of San Diego’s accounts.”
Hettena added: “Holman saves his Catholic views for the California Catholic Daily,” a weekly San Diego paper whose website was dark Saturday. “The Reader would be a much more honest publication, and I think a much more interesting one, if it gave voice to Holman’s faith instead of avoiding it.”
On Saturday, Holman likened his anti-abortion work to fighting the Nazis in World War II.
After having kids, he said he started reading about the Holocaust and Third Reich Germans and thought: “I’m not going to be like those Germans. I’m not going to sit there.”
But Holman echoed Hettena: “The bishops of San Diego hated me … because they were the subject of lots of San Diego on the QT,” the humor page nicknamed “Almost Factual News.”
Bottom line: Holman wanted the Reader viewed as independent.
“I tried to keep away from any one particular point of view,” he said. “It’s more interesting that way — you keep people guessing.”
Another veteran of San Diego’s alt-press scene is Doug Porter, who recalls writing in the 1970s heyday of the “underground press.” Porter wrote for the OB Liberator, the Street Journal, the OB Rag and spent several years at the San Diego Door.
Asked to comment on the Reader’s print demise, Porter said “good riddance.”
“I do have a lot of thoughts, dating back to 1974ish,” he said via email. “Bastards got their startup from business owners who wanted the underground press gone.
“You have to put this in the context of the Nixon’s administration’s persuasion efforts to get record companies to stop buying ads.”
He sent links to two stories about the underground press, one an overview of the genre noting efforts to muzzle San Diego outlets and one, from 1992, in the Reader itself.
“I felt the Reader initially served as a diversion to draw an audience away from the alternative/underground press, but it’s probably objectively true that it was a product of its times,” Porter said.
“They never made the leap away from newsprint; their online product was stuck in the aughts. It’s never good when another part of the legacy media dies. Many of today’s blogs are more about getting attention than they are about writing about history as it happens.”
Holman said that early on in his Reader tenure, several alt-press owners met him to propose a merger of their papers, including the hyper-political Newsline written by Larry Remer, the father of county Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer.
At talks in an Ocean Beach park, he recalled the chat devolving into a “hate fest” over Duncan Shepherd, the Reader’s film critic “who defied everyone’s sensibilities.” No merger resulted.
Holman says Shepherd, a shy but very well-educated person, is “very quietly retired. He will answer my emails in three or four sentences.”
Updated at 12:10 a.m. Feb. 16, 2025
