The Reader's Other Redesign — Now With More Firing

By Margaret Lyons in News on Dec 7, 2007 3:57PM

Bad news out of the Reader offices: Harold Henderson, John Conroy, Tori Marlan and Steve Bogira were fired yesterday. Henderson and Conroy were two marquee names for the paper: Conroy has written the definitive chronicle of police torture in the City since 1990, and Henderson has written one jillion crotchety stories over the years. Sleep with one eye open, Ben Joravsky!

According to editor Allison True's memo,

Unfortunately the financial pressures of our industry continue unabated, and I'm very sorry to announce that as a cost-cutting measure we eliminated several positions in editorial this week.

The people we cut — John Conroy, Harold Henderson, and Tori Marlan, as well as Steve Bogira, who's been on a leave of absence — are all staff writers, and as you might guess, this move represents a shift in the financial structure of our relationship with contributors.

Michael Miner weighs in, writing that "Conroy was, in effect, the canary in the coal mine — as long as he was OK readers would know the Reader was OK."

Wait, there were people who thought the Reader was going to be OK? The Reader has been stale and pedantic for years and either unable or unwilling to create a business model that didn't rely on classified ads.