John Bryan

Who was John Bryan?

John Charles Bryan was an American newspaper publisher, editor and journalist who was best known for founding and running the Los Angeles alternative newspaper Open City. The son of a Cleveland, Ohio newspaperman, the Cleveland-born Bryan worked as a journalist for a wide variety of major newspapers: the San Diego Tribune, the Los Angeles Mirror, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Houston Post, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner.

He quit The San Francisco Chronicle in 1964 in order to found the tabloid weekly Open City Press.

Open City Press covered San Francisco's bohemian community. Bryan published 15 issues between November 18, 1964 to March 17–23, 1965. Open City Press was a local forerunner of the Berkeley Barb, providing coverage of the Free Speech Movement. It was a one-man operation. In the beginning Bryan bought a case of metal monotype and hand-set his own copy, pulling proofs to paste up for cheap offset reproduction.