For nearly four decades, when a band played its first real show in this city, the News & Review was where you read about it. The alt-weekly in the red boxes covered the bars and the ballots, the dive shows and the spicy personals. It was free, it was everywhere, and it put a reporter on the local scene when nobody else would.
This month, it changed hands.
The paper began as a fight. Students ran a newspaper at Chico State called The Wildcat, clashed with the administration over editorial independence, and took it off campus. That became the Chico News & Review in 1977, independent on purpose, built to answer to readers instead of an institution. The same company launched the Sacramento News & Review in 1989, then the Reno News & Review in 1995. At its peak, Chico Community Publishing ran all three free papers across Northern California and Nevada on one bet: hand a city a free paper, let the venues and the classifieds pay the bills, and cover the place like it matters.
In June, SN&R's founders gave both websites, SN&R and its sister paper the Chico News & Review, to The Sacramento Observer for no money at all. Jeff vonKaenel and Deborah Redmond will keep running the site for now, "under Larry's auspices," as vonKaenel put it. Larry Lee says their roles shrink from here.
Sacramento should be glad about who caught it. The Observer is one of the most storied papers in the city: Black-owned, co-founded in 1962 by Gino Gladden, John Cole, and Lee's late father, Dr. William H. Lee, and named the best Black newspaper in the country eight times. It keeps growing while most of the industry shrinks. Lee took over from his father in 2015 and built a Central Valley network that runs from Sacramento to Chico to a new web outlet in Stockton. SN&R extends that reach. For a brand that came this close to vanishing, a thriving local institution taking it in is the best ending on the table.
There's still no use pretending nothing was lost.
The math stopped working years ago. The model ran on free distribution and local ads from venues and classifieds, and that revenue came apart in stages. Craigslist took the personals, then Google and Facebook took the display dollars, and the pandemic took the rest in one brutal spring. vonKaenel once put the cost of keeping SN&R alive at $45,000 a week. A $700,000 federal relief loan bought time in 2020; the last print edition hit newsstands on December 10 that year. The site went web-only after that. By this year it carried no full-time staff at all. A newsroom that once filled the red boxes now runs on freelancers and republished copy from CalMatters and KFF Health News.
Age played its part too. vonKaenel is 75, he and Redmond are both in their seventies, and they said the mission needed a succession plan to outlast them. "I enjoyed having 80,000 circulation," vonKaenel told the Bee. "But I also enjoyed having the body of a 25-year-old." "Things change," he added.
In its prime, the paper ran stories a daily newspaper would never clear. In 1996 a 26-year-old SN&R writer named Rachel Leibrock went undercover as a student at C.K. McClatchy High School. She used a fake name, the art department forged a transcript, and vonKaenel posed as her uncle to enroll her. She came back with a cover story. Leibrock teaches journalism now and says she wouldn't run that piece today. An alt-weekly had room for that kind of swing.
SN&R mattered to Sacramento because it staffed local culture as a real beat. It put reporters on music, theater, and the weird stuff at the edges. When a paper like that thins out and hands off its keys, keeping the website online answers only the small question. The bigger one stays open: who keeps covering the scene with that kind of attention?
The Observer is a serious newsroom with deep roots, and its mission centers on Sacramento's African American civic life. Lee has been candid that the SN&R and Chico deals are partly an advertising play, one media buy that now reaches "from Chico all the way to Stockton." He says he won't hire staff for either paper. The economics demand that. So the work of chronicling the city's music, its listings and its small rooms, lost its full-time home when the red boxes emptied.
None of this is a victory lap. vonKaenel and Redmond kept a free press alive in this region for decades and chose continuity over a payday. Those archives hold decades of Northern California life: punk clubs and city hall, wildfires and gallery openings, the record nobody else got paid to keep. (Chico State's Meriam Library has digitized CN&R issues back to 1978; the city is converting the paper's old Del Paso Boulevard building, dark since the last print run, into a public library.) The Observer keeps the lights on and the record intact. Both are good for Sacramento.
A scene stays documented only if someone shows up to do it. Jimmy Boegle, who runs the Reno News & Review and once led the alt-weekly trade group, says the papers still thriving are the ones that work their communities and try new things. They don't sit still. That job used to belong to a free paper in a red box. Now it belongs to whoever shows up.
The News & Review's lights are still on. We'll be watching what gets written under them, and what still needs someone else to write it.
Sources: The Sacramento Observer; Sacramento Bee — Graham Womack; the Sacramento News & Review founders' note; Comstock's Magazine; the Meriam Library / CSU Chico CN&R archive, 1978–2004; Solving Sacramento. Reporting compiled June 2026.
Cover images: Sacramento News & Review / Chico Community Publishing, shown for editorial commentary.
