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The purpose of The Reader is to improve US society through dramatically improving the level at which Americans are informed on the most important issues.  We see this purpose as having historical significance because of the necessity that Americans be well informed, engaged and inspired by honest information.  

The Reader team will accomplish this mission through creating, one relationship at a time, one community at a time, what is one of the most trusted and influential local media channels for each community, in physical and digital format.  

It is not necessary—nor will we strive— for every person in every community to trust and respect The Reader.  

What we are striving for is for the majority of people in the majority of communities to trust and respect The Reader.  In fact our mission is to be the most influential media channel for the majority of American adults.  Our model has been carefully designed to allow it to conform to the unique contours of every unique community, while holding fast to ageless principles such as truth, justice and tolerance.  

We are living through a unique moment in which there is widespread, global outrage that the media establishment has largely betrayed the trust of the public, and widespread longing for media with moral courage.   Rather than trying to revolutionize media with a new compact between audience and media entity by building a massive national platform, The Reader seeks to lead this revolution by building a massive local platform, present in every community in America, structurally capable of providing people with honest information, free to all.

The medium with which we connect with people, be it paper, the Internet or something else will change.  What will not change is improving US society one community at a time as the first priority of this company.  From this prioritized mission, success will be the fruit.  

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Azimjon Askarov, honored with CPJ's 2012 International Press Freedom Award from Committee to Protect Journalists on Vimeo.

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We Are In Crisis

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Created by Graham O'Shaughnessy 

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learn more at www.reader.us/effect

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the enormity of the opportunity

I’m endeavoring to reduce to the fewest words possible why we see enormous opportunity and the reason is because of the lack of good options in local advertising for U.S. businesses.  From this all else follows.  

Unless you’re in that marketplace and have been in it for some time, you would not really see this.  

There are articles occasionally in venture capital sites that talk about “local advertising being a very big opportunity”, but I don’t think what I’ve read has ever gotten too deep into why, without the article or analysis quickly moving on to another sector and talking about it.  

But if you have been in this marketplace for sometime, and then study how the marketplace works (and is) in local communities across the U.S. what you see is that there is a high density of businesses in most geographic areas with a high degree of willingness to spend money (and can do so fast because decisions can be made by an owner in an hour rather than two weeks or two months) on local advertising.

And there are few good advertising vehicles, not that they don’t exist, but that there are few of them, and in some communities, they don’t exist.

And then the other reason for the opportunity, the reason there is opportunity in media now, and by media I mean in providing information for people and providing advertising, but let’s focus on the media aspect of it, is because America has been tired of the status quo and has been disillusioned with the status quo since the financial crisis.

And for seven or eight years since the crisis (and at least since the mid-seventies) there has been no nationwide media brand, or voice, that is addressing this disillusionment, that is addressing this longing for an authentic voice.

A voice that sees the decision to sell out or to be less than totally up front with an audience as a fate worse than death.

And what we know is that advertising, alongside this kind of radical transparency and...and even not totally radical, not even to that degree, but even endeavoring to get closer to that ideal, a lot closer than the establishment media is, which continually avoids real debate and which is so easily outed for its complicity in the problems of our society... is BOUGHT by advertisers.  

The establishment media can’t, or doesn’t want to, or is terrified of delivering reality and the truth, because they are so wedded to large corporate advertisers, that have a lot to hide from the truth.  

So, now we’ve all sort of figured it out.  The establishment media can’t really talk about real reasons for the division (or anything!) in a really serious way.

They can’t talk about climate change, or talk about the banking system, and the entire financial system. They can’t really address serious, systemic introspection and present it in all its frightening force. Although, that is what a increasingly large amount of people crave in American society. Not to be fear-mongered—but to be told the truth.

If I had to reduce it to three, three elements it is:

1.) the lack of good local advertising vehicles in community after community despite the enormous amount of available...and willingness...to spend money on local advertising.

2.) the lack of a media channel, or media voice, a media brand that presents, that addresses, what you might call the failure of media to place events and to provide an analysis of events in historical context as well as a failure of a media entity that is available nationwide to touch...and not just available nationwide but reaches really large audiences that presents kind of radical truth at a time where Americans want radical truth and disdain anything that hints of sugar-coating, complicity with the actual sources of the problems, omission of the fundamental stuff that is ruling, controlling and defining their lives.

3. A realistic sense of the actual scale of the money that is spent in the Unites States to market and to sell products and services that, unless you’re in the marketplace and have felt how much and how fast money is actually changing hands...you can’t fully appreciate...even if people are telling you “$400 billion” per year is spent in the U.S. on ads and marketing.

It’s almost incomprehensible, I think, but it’s less so when you sell advertising.  

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This excellent essay by Carne Ross, written more than four years ago, seems unusually timely as it reminds us our obsession with “leadership” misses the mark: “This obsession is not only demeaning (both to the candidates, and to us); it is profoundly dangerous.”  

Down With Leadership

By Carne Ross, February 2012 

The Republican primaries grind on. Now that Newt Gingrich has declared his determination to fight it out until the convention in August, the year’s news “agenda” will be wholly dominated by the soap-opera arguments of the presidential contest. Though tediously drawn-out, the ritualized debates reveal little of how the successful candidate will really perform once in office. But one message comes through, unintentionally, loud and clear. Our political culture, and indeed society, is obsessed with the idea of “leadership.” This obsession is not only demeaning (both to the candidates, and to us); it is profoundly dangerous.

Our culture fetishizes leadership. A thousand books extol the “leadership lessons” of tycoons and sportsmen. The leaders are wise; the rest are rendered impotent sheep. As the deification of the leader and his superhuman qualities reaches its orgiastic climax in the presidential election, it seems almost blasphemous to point out an awkward new reality. The king is shedding his clothes. Leadership, at least of the traditional political kind, is not working.

The nature of the world today is dramatically altered from the circumstance of only a few years ago. Globalization is spawning an immense and growing complexity, requiring new forms of management. It is simply impossible for any single authority to understand or arbitrate this maelstrom. Yet this omniscience is what we demand of our leaders.

Any event, from recession or war to the creation of a single job, is now the function of countless myriad and ever-changing factors. This always was the case, but now it is more so. Nevertheless, like children looking up at teacher, our infantile political culture requires the would-be leader to claim that they alone can make wise decisions to govern this extraordinary complexity. The gameshow format of the campaign debates (which tells its own story) only highlights the absurdity: “In 30 seconds, please tell us how you would save the economy?”

The evidence of the disastrous ineffectiveness of top-down “leader-led” management of the world is all around, should we care to see it. In the environment, climate change accelerates. In the economy, volatility mounts untrammeled by the confused and belated efforts of governments, forever behind the curve. In society, inequality and social tension are in parallel ascent.

Traditionally, and with easy resentment, we blame politicians and political parties for these failures. But the uncomfortable truth is they are not the problem. The problem is in fact us, for in our pathetic obeisance to the leadership cult we have abdicated not only our own responsibility, but, worse, our much greater power to deal with today’s new world.

In a complex system, the most potent agent of change is not authority but the individual, and the group. The era of a world organized and dominated by states and their leaders is ending. No one will take their place in the director’s chair. No single agency or leader will determine any particular event, or necessarily understand it. An era of leaderless change is upon us, where history will be written by the many, not the few.

This shift is buttressed by recent research in network theory: Complex systems resist centralized command-and-control, but individuals can trigger change across the system. Other research highlights another under-rated vector of change – those with most influence upon the behavior of others are not government, not experts, but those right beside us: neighbors, family and peers.

Conventional assumptions about political power are thus overturned. It is action by individuals, and with others, which offers the most effect. As we realize the decline of the leader-based model, a new form of self-organized politics will emerge.

Rather than looking to distant authority for answers, individuals and groups will pursue change directly through their own behavior, for the means, as Gandhi taught, are the ends. To arbitrate our common business, people are starting to negotiate directly and horizontally. In cities around the world, participatory democracy, where all can take part in decision-making, is producing fairer, less corrupt and more sustainable outcomes. Decisions made through mass participation reflect the interests of everyone and not just those with privileged connection to the leadership.

Watching the trading of hollow slogans in the debates, we intuitively know that the leader-centric model is not working. Taking responsibility instead ourselves will demand more work. But action by us is not only more effective, it is also more fulfilling than the cynicism and frustration evoked by today’s leader-obsessed political culture.

Worshipping leaders is more than usually dangerous in today’s new complex circumstance, but this cult has long denied our own remarkable power.

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Message to Julian Assange/Wikileaks sent today from Reader Magazine

In the past, The Reader, a free, printed community magazine mailed to 390,000 Californians from every possible political background has always come out in support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, in our actual printed magazine and online.  

We endeavored to share with our readers how you have created greater public understanding of the inner-workings of power, government and geo-politics, and in this you have done good work in the public interest.  

That said, you have totally lost our confidence and trust as a result of the bumbling way in which you theatrically published information during this presidential election, potentially altering, in a lopsided way, the outcome of a U.S. Presidential election.  

Lasting, safe and secure political and social reform requires a self-sacrificial focus on fairness and understanding of one’s responsibility to embody, build and provide solutions-- not simply destroy social order.   

Your actions smell of grandstanding and you have lost our support and endorsement. 

Chris Theodore

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Noble Media, Inc.

5 East Citrus Avenue, Suite 103 • Redlands, CA 92373

Founded in 2001, Noble Media, Inc. is a California benefit corporation, certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.  Noble Media, Inc. publishes The Reader, which is mailed quarterly in print to 390,000 people in Southern California.  

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From The Correspondent

According to Correspondent Sarah Kendzior, regardless of who wins next week's presidential election, Donald Trump has already done lasting damage to the political culture of the United States. His open appeals to racism evoke a dark period in the country's history, when mob violence against black Americans was the norm.

This week, Sarah investigates that history and finds hope in the example of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a journalist who chose to give his life rather than stay silent about the horrors of slavery.

Lovejoy spent his too-brief career documenting injustice along the banks of the Missouri River, the same river that Lewis and Clark traveled during their legendary expedition. Two centuries later, Correspondent Arjen van Veelen took a journey of his own on the Missouri and found traces of the famous duo everywhere.

As Arjen puts it in this week's second story, "every place they'd ever taken a leak or stopped for a sandwich was marked with a plaque or a statue." But while many white Americans look at these displays with pride, they say something very different to Native Americans. They say, "Here – and over there, too – we discovered you." Join Arjen on the river and see why he thinks a perfect storm is brewing in the U.S.

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Positive News, Autumn 2016, #87 on Magpile.

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Microaggressions are small, subtle forms of discrimination – so conversations about them often get dominated by people who say they’re “no big deal.” Which may make you wonder if you or other people are just being too sensitive when microaggressions hurt.

This comic puts that theory to rest by showing exactly how microaggressions take such a toll you on – and why it’s no small thing when you get through a day like this one.

COMIC BY Alli Kirkham, a Contributing Comic Artist for Everyday Feminism and blogger, cartoonist, and intersectional feminist. Alli earned a BA in English Literature from Cal Poly Pomona in 2011 and uses it as an excuse to blog about books while swearing a lot. When she isn’t cartooning for Everyday Feminism or cursing at popular fiction, she posts cartoons and other silly things on her Tumblr. Check her out on Twitter @allivanlahr. 

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USA. Chicago, Il. January, 1962. Bernie Sanders and other CORE activists during a sit-in at the University of Chicago

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FORTY NINE READER COVERS

Founded in 2001, The Reader Magazine is the only news publication in America -- and within the $140 billion U.S. local advertising marketplace -- that helps advertisers to influence local audiences through positive environmental, social and economic impact in communities.