Chicago Reader37%
Chicago’s new indie print publications want to highlight today’s cultural scene 14%
By Abby Monteil13%
7/24/2026, 6:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Anecdotal, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 15.5% saturation with 259 hits. Analysis detected 2,142 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,666 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 25.3% and a BS Rank of 14% (22,195 of 25,564 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 86.80% of the article peer group.
When Ian Fugett began promoting his new magazine, the pub, he quickly realized that he wasn’t alone.
“I would be hanging flyers, and someone would come up to me, like, ‘Oh, you started a publication.
We just started a publication,’” he says.
“It feels like you’re not cool in the city unless you’re starting a publication.”
Over the past few years alone, Chicago has experienced a boom in indie print publications with a vested interest in hyperlocal arts coverage.
Some center their issues around certain themes: Queer nightlife magazine The Issue, which has published three times since launching in March 2025, focuses on queer nightlife, while “party literary mag, part lifestyle” magazine Gab has put out three issues since spring 2024centered on break-ups, coming-of-age, and illusions.
Others curate submissions from local creatives: the pub, a quarterly, print-only publication, commissions a blend of Chicago-based long-form reporting, creative writing, and DIY, underground scene-based writing; and self-described archival project Write That Down!
releases seasonal, biannual issues with submissions reflecting everyday mementos and anecdotes from Chicago.
Regardless, editors of the five publications featured here expressed a common goal: capturing the city’s cultural scene as it is right now.
“We wanna highlight the whole of Chicago, not just what’s going on in our direct echo chamber,” says The Issue cocreator Andrew Davalos.
“I think we can sometimes get a little forgotten on the world stage, and I just think [about] how lucky we are to preserve the amazing talent we have in this city, at this time, right now.”
Not beholden to traditional advertisers or publishers, these publications have the freedom to make their editorial output as niche and boundary-pushing as they like.
Some outlets, like The Issue and Gab, sell physical copies of their magazines to offset costs.
Write That Down!
prints their issues at team members’ various workplaces, while the pub hosts a select number of ticketed events (although Fugett describes his first print run of four thousand copies for $450 as “mad affordable”).
The flexibility of self-publishing was a key part of the appeal for Colette Postaer, whose magazine, Knotted Lace, is a “love letter to Chicago’s artistic underground.”
“Everything is so DIY.
You throw something at a wall, and you see if it sticks here,” Postaer says.
“It’s not so polished.
[That] excites me because I’m not a polished artist, and I think that Chicago really offers space for that.”
Indie magazines have historically held particular significance for queer communities and communities of color, serving as tools for building community and sharing resources at times when mainstream media often casts them aside.
“Zines have always been a countercultural medium,” says Write That Down!
cocreator and printmaker Taj Richardson.
“So thinking about how printmaking has been used in history to distribute information [has] been big for me.”
Chicago is no exception—in 1991, Randolph Street Gallery hosted SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, what organizers called the first-ever queer zine convention.
As Sixty Inches From Center noted in a 2020 feature, the event “was significant for not only bringing artists face-to-face who had previously only corresponded through the mail or the rampant network, but also for generating a number of queer-punk meeting places.”
One memorable Chicago zine present at SPEW was Thing, which centered Black queer culture amid the backdrop of Chicago house music’s second wave and the ongoing AIDS crisis.
Founded by Robert Ford, Trent Adkins, and Lawrence Warren in 1989, Thing published issues roughly every three to four months until its closure in 1993.
As art critic Solveig Nelson noted in a 2018 Artforum essay, its title was part homage to the “do your own thing” ethos of DIY culture, and part tribute to the magazine’s own definition of “THING: A person or Thing of incorrigible and unbearable Fabulousness.”
“We knew for ourselves what a rich and important cultural thing gay Black men have and share,” Ford told Chicago author and historian Owen Keehnen in a later interview.
“We wanted to make a magazine that would be a way of documenting our existence and contribution to society.
Our idea was not so much [to] radicalize or subvert the idea of magazines as to make one from our own point of view.”
When The Issue cocreator Jack Mcguinness visited the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s “City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicag” exhibition last summer, he was struck by the connection that he felt to past queer printmakers.
The show featured a table with “magazines printed by the queer community through the decades” and photographs of historic cruising spot the Belmont Rocks, which Mcguinness and Davalos had interviewed local historian Owen Keehnen about for a previous issue.
“I just felt a part of it, in some way,” he says.
“It’s so cool that there is this innate need to preserve the surroundings that you’re inhabiting right now, ’cause there’s so much cool talent here.”
The resurgence of Chicago’s print media scene also coincides with a growing modern analog media movement.
Fed up with feeling isolated in Internet spaces monopolized by technofeudal Big Tech companies, analog adopters are making conscious efforts to prioritize hands-on, interpersonal creativity in their day-to-day lives.
“I feel that Chicago is full of people that love analog,” says Gab magazine creator Isabella Mansfield.
“They wanna keep these traditional things alive, not for an aesthetic.
I think people appreciate it.”
Ed Marszewski, director of the Public Media Institute and publisher of Lumpen and Proximity magazines, got his start in Chicago independent publishing in the early 90s.
He tells the Reader that when the Internet first went mainstream in the mid-90s, many saw it as “an incredibly liberating technology.”
“[It] allowed independent groups and organizations to compete with the same kind of aesthetics and same amount of impact as the multinational media corporations did at the time,” he says.
“We were still printing, but also felt that the Internet was a great way of reaching more people.”
Marszewski points to social media algorithms as a primary source of disparities in how many independent outlets are often deprioritized online.
“The algorithm determines how they’re gonna market you, and how they’re gonna feed you whatever viewpoint or opinion you subscribe to, based on your demographic footprint,” he says.
“So it’s great to see print coming back.”
With the reemergence of analog, editors have been grappling with how to use the Internet as a resource.
Most of the magazines’ editors the Reader spoke to for this story mention using social media to a certain extent, but Fugett and the pub’s team have made the conscious decision to forgo it completely.
To grab a copy of the pub, readers have to go to their Bucktown office or one of 150 distribution points around the city.
Although doing so was a gamble, he says it has reinforced the pub’s mission to become a community platform.
“You’ve taken the extra step to get there, and now you’re a little bit more invested than you were prior, and you’re going to tell someone about it,” he says.
“Having that friction can create a much more meaningful experience.”
Meanwhile, Knotted Lace launched an “artist highlight” video series to spotlight creatives in each issue.
Write That Down!
shares a PDF of each issue online, and cocreator Richardson has floated the idea of uploading a version that readers could print out and bind themselves.
“We post memes, but none of us are trying to engage [on social media besides saying], ‘Go check this out, go to this, this is a good job board to look at,’” he says.
“Just amplifying.”
Editors from all five magazines stress the importance of carrying each publication’s local focus into real-life events.
The pub hosts a rotating lineup of themed gatherings: In April alone, you could attend chess night, collage night, and a linocut workshop, to name a few of their offerings.
Write That Down!
hosts show-and-tell events in partnership with Chicago’s Guild Literary Complex, in which participants share personal stories about a favorite knickknack or keepsake.
These items are then archived, scanned, and often included in subsequent Write That Down!
issues.
“There’s something chic about going to a magazine release,” she says.
“It feels fabulous, especially a magazine where they’re encouraging you to dress up.
There’s no excuse to dress up anymore, except if you’re going to a wedding.
I think people need that opportunity to be flamboyant.”
It’s undoubtedly an exciting time for local media, but what is it about the city in particular that encourages people to start their own magazines?
Fugett hypothesizes that the uniqueness of Chicago’s print scene has roots in the city’s political history.
“It has to do with a lot of the union [and] labor organizing movements in Chicago, and the fact that Chicago is [in my view] the largest blue-collar city [in the country],” he says.
“Chicago people aren’t going to wait around, and they don’t like taking no for an answer.
It’s very scrappy.”
His words bring Salsedo Press to mind; the local business was initially founded by University of Illinois students in 1969, after their anti–Vietnam war newspaper, The Walrus, faced censorship from other printing presses.
Marszewski adds that many progressive printers have long used unionized printers, which shows “you are an ally to the working class.”
When asked what advice they’d give to prospective magazine creators, the editors I interviewed echoed the same sentiment: Go for it, and your audience will come.
“When I was putting [the pub] together, someone told me they were worried about what issue one is going to look like,” Fugett says.
“And someone else was like, ‘Dude, it doesn’t matter.
As long as it’s not AI, people are going to love this.
You have the ethos of it.’
As long as you know the direction you’re going, people will follow.”
Gab magazine
@gab.magazine | thegabmag.com
The Issue
@the_issue_mag | theissuemag.com
Knotted Lace
@kno.ttedlace | knottedlace.xyz
The Pub
thepubchicago.com
Write That Down!
@writethatdown.mag | writethtdown.wordpress.com
Analysis
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