San Diego Reader

The San Diego Reader is an alternative press newspaper in the county of San Diego. Published weekly since October 1972, the Reader is distributed free on Wednesday and Thursday via street boxes and cooperating retail outlets.

History
Founder Jim Holman, a navy veteran, worked for the Chicago Reader before starting up in San Diego. The initial press run of the San Diego Reader was 20,000 copies. In 1989, it was printing 131,000 copies a week and in 2015, the circulation was 90,000. In 1988, the Reader moved into a former restaurant in Little Italy and moved to offices in Golden Hill in 2012.

In a 1989 story about the paper, the Los Angeles Times wrote that it had developed a reputation as being "liberal", and contrasted that to Holman's morality-driven rules for the paper, such as refusing to publish advertisements promoting abortion services and prohibiting personal advertisements seeking homosexual relationships (later modified to prohibit all personal ads). He also runs the anti-abortion California Catholic Daily website from the same offices.

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, 30 employees agreed to take pay cuts equivalent to half of their pay.