A LOOK AT THE honor boxes on any busy streetcorner shows Chicago’s stuffed with printed matter, from the society rag CS, a local project that expanded to other cities, to the nightlife guide UR Chicago to the green living Conscious Choice. Factor in Time Out Chicago, the local edition of an international chain, glossy monthlies like Chicago magazine, and neighborhood pubs like the salmon-colored Chicago Journal and it would appear the town is covered from Rogers Park to South Shore. But there’s more to local media than immediately meets the eye.
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(venuszine.com), founded in 1995 in editor Amy Schroeder’s Michigan State dorm room, is now a thriving showcase for coverage of women’s indie culture; the fall 2006 issue includes an interview with designer Anna Sui, an over-the-top homage to the late, lamented Sleater-Kinney, and a thoughtful exploration of the weird world of pro-anorexia Web sites and blogs. The mag recently got an infusion of energy (and cash) from new publishers and is poised for a redesign and expanded distro. Rounding out this trifecta is Stop Smiling (stopsmilingonline.com), a glossy lifestyle mag published approximately every couple of months out of a Wicker Park storefront that doubles as an event space called “The Syndicate.” Stop Smiling bills itself as “the magazine for highminded lowlifes,” with each issue organized around a theme. In practice that means—as in the recent
Punk Planet, Venus, and Stop Smiling all maintain high profiles around town, but their content itself isn’t Chicagocentric. To get more of Chicago you need to pick up a copy of Lumpen. Launched in 1990 as the
Online, at the three-year-oldGapers Block (gapersblock.com), Andrew Huff and crew maintain an events calendar, blog about local news, and provide original content including sports commentary, a cooking column, and analysis of local politics. Of similar scope, if more scattershot and boosterish in tone, is Chicagoist (chicagoist.com), part of the national family of urban
