Chicago's Periodicals

Newspapers

Though the internet is changing the newspaper business dramatically, Chicago’s journalistic giants are still standing. The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times are the two big dailies, and the city’s great rivals.

Chicago’s free papers, like the Chicago Reader and Newcity, provide street-savvy alternatives. The Chicago Defender, one of the most influential African American papers in the country, is over 100 years old.

Magazines and Zines

Chicago’s magazines set trends in pop culture, music, art, home decorating, medicine, pets, nuclear science, and most other areas under the sun.

Ebony and Jet are icons of African American culture and style, published by Johnson Publishing, Inc., the largest African American publisher in the U.S., founded in Chicago in 1942.

Stop Smiling investigates every aspect of American culture with profiles of movie moguls, rock stars, politicians and writers. Venus lends a feminist perspective to its pop culture coverage. Proximity seeks out art scenes here and abroad, revealing “art worlds, real and imagined.”

Poetry magazine has been discovering great poetry from its Chicago perch for a century, and the world’s top poets and critics still aim for its pages. Make:  A Chicago Literary Magazine highlights international writing with local flair.

Meanwhile, self-published zines and comic books proliferate, offering up an endless variety of new fiction, memoir, poetry, photography, criticism and art.

Journals

Chicago’s roster of prestigious journals shows off the city’s intellectual, literary and artistic energy.

Chicago Review, from the University of Chicago, is a serious source for literature with cutting-edge poetry, fiction and criticism. Triquarterly, from Northwestern, is a classic literary journal and a favorite of writers and poets. The Journal of Artists’ Books, now at Columbia College, offers inspiration for book and paper artists and their fans.

The Common Review keeps its readers up on the classics. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists monitors the nuclear world and keeps the “Doomsday Clock” ticking. The Journal of the American Medical Association is the most widely circulated medical journal in the world.