Jim Moorhead launched Renew in the right town. When his magazine starts to grow he’ll want to add writers and editors. And there’s no shortage in Chicago of first-rate, experienced journalists in recovery.
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Who doesn’t have a drunk or substance abuser somewhere in his life? The market is all of us.
Alison True, the former editor of the Reader, knows Moorhead through the Near North Montessori School, where her husband teaches. Moorhead’s daughter is a student there. (Her teacher, incidentally, is my daughter.) True is familiar with Moorhead’s plans and she thinks Renew can succeed for the same reason the Reader did. “We used to say, ‘Who reads the Reader? Reader readers are people who read the Reader,’” True tells me, sharing an insight that might sound like a mindless tautology and is anything but. “He can’t capture the 20 million people in recovery. He can capture the people in recovery who want to identify as people in recovery.” In other words, Renew can create the audience waiting to be formed as soon as a magazine came along to form it.
Ten years ago his dad sold off the last of the magazines. Newly married, Moorhead needed a job but wasn’t looking for one. “My disease of alcohol addiction really took off,” he says. He tried an outpatient program at Northwestern Hospital. “That didn’t take.” He sampled a 12-step program. “I went back to my old ways.” Friends cornered him at a wedding and made him admit he needed help, but his visits to a series of treatment centers did him no lasting good. Then he heard about an “alternative treatment” in Arizona. “When I was there I didn’t talk about addiction—I talked about childhood trauma, something I never thought I had to address. I said, ‘Guys, I don’t think I belong here.’ But in the end it was really cool. I was able to draw connections, like lights going off in my head.”
“We had a few like that,” Moorhead allows.
