The magazine was founded in 1984 by Eric Utne as the
Utne Reader. Its tagline was "the best of the alternative press". For its first 20 years
Jay Walljasper was editor; Julie Ristau was its publisher. During these years it was transformed "from a tiny New Age newsletter to a thick, ad-rich magazine with more than 300,000 subscribers." Utne chaired the magazine until the late 1990s, when his then-wife Nina Rothschild Utne took over. The magazine was headquartered in
Minneapolis. The cover logo was changed to simply
Utne in 2003, continuing until 2006, with the subtitle,
A Different Read on Life. In 2006 the magazine was purchased by
Ogden Publications, publishers of
Grit,
Mother Earth News,
Natural Home, and other magazines.
Utne Reader ceased physical publication in 2019 and is now a digital digest at utne.com. Eric Utne looked into re-acquiring the magazine in 2020 but was rebuffed by the publisher. "'It's sad to see it go', Utne said. 'These times need something like this more than ever. Our editorial credo was to no particular point of view. No one has the sole proprietorship on good ideas. It takes multiple perspectives to come closer to the truth.'" According to
The New York Times,
Utne Reader was a leader of the
salon movement of the 1980s, devoted to debate on the issues of the day.
Utne Reader was an early source of coverage of the
mythopoetic men's movement when it first surfaced in the early 1990s. ==Utne Independent Press Awards==