Noble Media, Inc. publishes The Reader and is a California benefit corporation, certified by the non-profit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency.
The Reader is mailed quarterly in print to 390,000 people in Southern California. Noble Media generates revenue from quality local advertising, which provides primarily small and mid-sized local and regional businesses a competitive advantage against larger competitors. Advertising customers value The Reader and consistently renew their contracts.
The mission of Noble Media is to dramatically and permanently improve US society by creating a new nationwide information source, which delivers quality information in tangible form to every single American at no cost, a first in American history.
To achieve this, Noble Media plans to expand from one profitable zone to more than five hundred profitable zones over the next several years, with circulation reaching more than 150 million people across the United States. The Reader aims to be the category leader of the $140 billion U.S. local advertising market through satisfying part of the demand for authentic local media in U.S. communities which daily newspapers no longer satisfy and digital media, for now, fails to satisfy.
IMAGINE A BETTER FUTURE
People know that without an honest system of news and information, we can’t solve our problems because we won’t know what they are. We can live in a world closer to our ideal of what we deserve. But we have to create an information system that gets the power of truth working again in the United States.
Consider the enormity of the impact a 40-page magazine would have on a family-- if it was well written-- over a period of one year, five years or ten years if it brought this family precisely the kind of investigative news that has been successfully marginalized by the dominant media. Investigative news networks such as INN which comprises 74 non-profit, non-partisan news organizations such as The Center for Public Integrity, Open Secrets, NPR and others today have no chance of reaching a critical mass of the US population because they lack "the pipes"-- the distribution system. What if they had one?
IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
Towards the end of his life when Albert Einstein was asked how problems that threatened the very survival of man might be solved (such as nuclear war) he replied a different way of thinking must be used than the thinking that created the problem. He declared there were really only two choices before humanity: maintain our way of thinking in which we accept that disagreements be resolved through war or renounce war through a new mentality.
If it is true that continued life on planet earth depends on this choice, it follows that we should look very closely to see if our news and information system-- which is most responsible for shaping judgement-- is promoting violence or peace.
When we do, what is obvious is that our entire media is structured in a way that promotes violence and encourages war. Moreover, that aspect of its structure responsible for promoting violence and encouraging war-- which is the vested interest media companies have in transnational corporations which profit from war and weaponry-- is arguably accelerating.
This interest shapes the thinking of the majority of people to believe that man is incapable of renouncing violence and that weaponry is man's only real hope for security— precisely the thinking Einstein warned would lead to no other end than man’s demise.
As such, there is nothing more important right now than to immediately put in place a new journalistic channel reaching every one, free of the power structures which control and perpetuate old thinking. In addition to enormous environmental, social and economic promise, this is the enormous humanistic promise of the creation of a Reader Nation.
We have a plan to take this very unique publication from where it is today and transform it into a nation wide information source that can communicate stories at a scale massive enough to create a transformative social movement to greater social justice and equality, a model powered by good old fashioned Main Street American businesses, the kind my grandfather--my Babu--started and worked at his whole life.
-- Christopher Theodore, Founder of The Reader Magazine You can reach him at ctheodore@readermagazine.net