The Cromer Reader is an ongoing collection that showcases the work of Mark Cromer, a professional writer who has spent four decades reporting on culture, crime, politics, immigration, population growth and sex in the twilight of the American Age.
The site focuses on the organic intelligence of actual readers and intentionally counter programs against the evaporating attention spans and the accelerating retarded cognition of the masses of dolts who rely on screen burps and hieroglyphs to communicate. Longer form writing is purposefully featured here as a new front against the League of Morons that Cromer’s hero Osbourne Cox had so valiantly battled in Burn After Reading.
The Cromer Reader features a selection of his work previously published by major newspapers and magazines as well as new stories, columns and essays, with updates posted in The Daily Read and longer feature reads posted in The Weekly Read.
Selections of his freewheeling correspondence, which became the subject of some notoriety among his journalistic circles in Los Angeles throughout the years, are featured in Dispatches From The Edge and are updated as he gets around to it.
Cromer’s writing career began in the 1980s in the newsrooms of the suburban dailies across Greater Los Angeles, where he burned a lot of shoe leather as a reporter working the crime beat before moving on to write features for the Los Angeles Times and covering culture for the LA Weekly and numerous other newspapers and magazines across the nation. His work has appeared in the New York Daily News, Southern California Magazine, The Nation, The Washington Times, Details, Bikini, Artillery and Los Angeles City Beat as well as many others both domestically and internationally by publications such as MAX in Paris and The Sunday Sport in London.
In 2005, Los Angeles City Beat published Cromer’s cover story ‘Man With A Gun’ which explored deadly officer-involved shootings from the perspective of the cops who had fatally shot criminal suspects. Among the veteran officers who Cromer interviewed for the story was Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Richard Madden, who as a young deputy had been involved in the deadly finale to the 1970 Newhall killings where four California Highway Patrolmen were gunned down by two convicts that had been released. Cromer was the only reporter Madden ever invited into his home and spoke with on-the-record about the shootout. Cromer also covered California courts for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and its sister daily newspaper San Francisco Daily Journal.
Cromer’s unique career arc saw him partner in the 1990s with America’s infamous libertine Larry Flynt, a collaboration that resulted in the outlaw publisher and First Amendment crusader’s first-ever multi-platform title that was cross-pollinated on print, video and digital platforms at LFP, Inc. and it served as the genesis of Hustler Video. Cromer was an executive editor, contributing editor, features editor and producer/director during his various stints with Flynt’s organization. He also assembled the investigative team for Flynt that explored George W. Bush’s salacious background in the run-up to the 2000 presidential campaign.
As the print media began cratering into its death spiral, Cromer moved into the field of business intelligence and investigations; first as a contractor for the global giant Kroll and then as the founding staff senior investigator for Sapient Investigations, Inc., a boutique full-service firm based in Santa Monica, California, where he worked fast-breaking cases requiring deep-dive research for more than a decade. At the behest of a client portfolio that included private equity funds, venture capital groups, law firms, real estate trusts and Fortune 500 corporations, Cromer worked behind the headlines on cases involving Washington politicians, Hollywood celebrities and Wall Street executives. While at Kroll and Sapient, Cromer worked regionally across Southern California, but he was also deployed across the country and on international cases.
Cromer’s second non-fiction book, California Twilight: Essays and Memories of The End of The Golden State was published in October 2024 by WildBlue Press. California Twilight is a 375-page collection of 36 columns and essays curated from Cromer’s previously published work on the impacts of mass migration into the United States and its role in completely remaking the state of his birth, violently rendering the once Golden State into an unrecognizable landscape of dysfunction and chaos.
From 2006 to 2010, Cromer was a Senior Writing Fellow at Californians for Population Stabilization, a Santa Barbara-based think tank founded by famed ecologist Garret Hardin that focused on overpopulation issues, and he became one of the most widely published and quoted writers in the organization’s history.
Cromer’s writing on mass migration has been published in newspapers and magazines around the world, including the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union-Tribune, VDARE, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Charlotte Observer, Austin American-Statesman, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and internationally by such publications as The Gulf Times in Qatar. Cromer addressed numerous college audiences on the impacts of mass immigration, from USC and UC Irvine to Occidental College and Claremont Graduate University. His commentary on mass immigration has been featured on CNN, PBS, CBS, KFI, the George Putnam Show and the Rush Limbaugh radio show and he appears in the documentary Growth Busters.
In the world of corporate communications, Cromer was the Media Liaison at Casa Colina Centers for Rehabilitation in Pomona, California, one of the nation’s premiere spinal cord and traumatic brain injury hospitals. His work on healthcare issues was published widely in healthcare industry trade media, including Rehab Management, New Mobility and Home Healthcare Dealer. In 1997, Santa Monica Press published his book Health Care Handbook: A Consumer’s Guide to the American Health Care System.
Cromer was also hired by Southern California Edison as a lead writer on the public utility’s Major Customer Communication’s team in 2000 and he was retained as a corporate comms writer by energy giant BP/ARCO from 2008 to 2010. Cromer’s writing also took him into the world of marketing, where he was tapped as the media liaison for Sasso & Burgoon, a full-service Los Angeles marketing agency where he notably coordinated the media positioning of Cinema Film Systems, Inc., in the run-up to the legendary projection company’s sale.
While Cromer’s dynamic career path provided him with a wild ride that has taken him from the bustling newsrooms of yore that were populated with shouting editors, chain-smoking reporters and bottles clinking in desk drawers through the seductive allure that shimmered in the lights of those Hollywood nights as he took up residency at Flynt’s dark kingdom before slipping away and into the clandestine wilds of corporate spook work with Kroll, ultimately his most fulfilling experience remains the independent collegiate magazine he launched during the twilight of the Reagan Administration.
In 1988, Cromer co-founded Low Magazine at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and was the publisher/editor of the independent student magazine for its decade-long lifespan, growing it from a first press run of 100 copies until he folded it at its circulation zenith of 20,000 copies that covered eight universities across Southern California and Northern Arizona and with subscribers in all 50 states.
Low Magazine began as a free speech protest that was launched with a couple of typewriters, some glue sticks, a camera, clip art and a serious bar tab and over a decade it grew into a glossy, four-color magazine packing nearly a hundred pages and featuring a notable roster of serious writers, artists and photographers and with an art director whose day job was an illustrator for Disney.
Among the upstart magazine’s many achievements, The New York Times published Low Magazine’s original cover photo of Timothy Leary on the front page of its national edition obituary of the counterculture icon in 1996. A year earlier, the magazine’s cover exposé on Montclair Mayor Larry Rhinehart’s sordid entanglement in a prostitution sting that the San Bernardino County District Attorney was reluctant to prosecute (hint: the DA and the Mayor were golf buddies) led to Rhinehart’s resignation.
Cromer’s salad days in the wheelhouse of Low Magazine were the most creatively fulfilling experience of his career in no small measure because it was an enterprise he first conceptualized and then brought to life to watch it spread, grow and ultimately triumph over the universities efforts to keep it off campuses even as their officially approved campus publications collapsed and died of sheer banality and utter incompetence in the shadow of Low.
The creative experience of Low Magazine was something akin to being in a garage band that played its ass off and persevered long enough to propel itself out the bar circuit and into the arenas, with each issue of Low assembled as an album and each new campus it expanded to a new concert hall to play in a new city. A rock n’ roll attitude and atmosphere permeated Low and Cromer and his creative collaborators and colleagues at the magazine enjoyed the party until it was time to move on, and many among its roster of contributing writers, photographers and artists would go on to great success in print, film and canvas mediums.
In 2025, San Diego State University’s nationally renowned Special Collections & Archives announced it will feature a complete collection of Low Magazine and a trove of the magazine’s often controversial poster campaigns as well as media generated by the renegade magazine and assorted ephemera. Low Magazine is also a featured collection at the Special Collections & Archives at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, the campus where the upstart ‘zine was born.
Early in his career, Cromer was one of the first mainstream journalists to cover the commercial pornography industry as something bigger and more culturally relevant than the ongoing ‘vice’ angle newspapers had long presented it. His writing on the industry, first appearing in Low Magazine and later in major newspapers and national magazines, led to the Frontline documentary American Porn and it featured his perspective. His groundbreaking reporting on the 1998 HIV outbreak in the Los Angeles porn industry was featured in the documentary Porndemic that premiered on Showtime in the fall of 2018.
Cromer was also the first reporter to investigate the extremely powerful and closeted gay Republican Congressman David Dreier’s anti-gay voting record and he was featured prominently in Academy Award-nominated Kirby Dick’s feature documentary Outrage.
Cromer studied journalism at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, from 1986 to 1990. In 1987, Cromer attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook as part of the National Student Exchange.
