Washington City Paper community media project

The Washington City Paper, the area's alternative weekly, stopped publishing in print in 2022 ("Staff And Locals React To End Of Washington City Paper Print Edition," DCist), but is still active online.  

(Many alternative papers across the country have shut down post covid, because during covid they weren't able to get entertainment-related advertising because people couldn't go out, and the financial impact was too much.)

Working with Humanities DC, the WCP sponsors a Community Journalism Program, "a 14-week course that teaches D.C. residents journalistic knowledge and skills as they report a local story."  Finished stories are often run by the "paper" albeit online. Applications are due Sunday, Jan. 11.

I think this is a great program that more newspapers, "regular ones" and alternative weeklies, should do.

I never had an article run in the WCP, but I did get a few letters to the editor published, and was mentioned from time to time in articles about historic preservation and transportation.

======

I consider the Washington City Paper one of my key teachers about urbanism and city governance.  When I first moved to the city in 1987, they ran a column by Mark Jenkins and Bill Rice called "Cityscapes," about urban architecture and urbanism.  I read it avidly (along with the "Shaping the City" column in the Washington Post, "Death of former Washington Post columnist Roger Lewis").

A Jenkins cover story in December 1987 was the first time I read about the concept of the "Purple Line" circumferential transit line--at the time it was proposed it was to be heavy rail--connecting all the end points of the various legs of the Metrorail lines--running through suburban Maryland and Virginia.

The current Purple Line under construction is light rail, not heavy rail, and will serve a small part of the proposed full line, from Bethesda in Montgomery County to New Carrollton in Prince George's County.

The paper ran so many cover stories that taught me so much about local politics.  I can think of stories on the schools, maintenance versus capital funding for key systems in DC buildings like heating and cooling systems, how the "Growth Machine" manipulated the zoning process, crony capitalism and using nonprofits as personal piggybanks by John Ray, a former Councilmember and his cronies, etc.

Plus the Loose Lips weekly column about the ins and outs of DC Government.

Note that much of the City Paper has been digitized and is available within the Washingtonia Collection on local history at the MLK Library in Downtown CD.

============

The paper was bought a few years ago by local private equity maven Mark Ein as a community spirited venture ("Mark Ein Talks About Buying Washington City Paper," ) without a focus on profits.  

Ein, who will not have a daily role at the paper, is the paper’s fifth owner in the last decade and has taken steps to make his stewardship of the long-troubled weekly* as benevolent as possible.

... In fact, Ein counts City Paper as one of what he calls his “community investments,” not his “day job, for-profit” investments. That said, he plans to assemble a team that can help the paper solve the revenue shortfalls caused by collapses in classified and display advertising. Untethered optimism, I note to him, has been a problem with some of City Paper‘s recent owners. “We’re all going into this with our eyes wide open,” he says. All his advisers “have a lot of ideas about alternative revenue sources. We’re not expecting it to be profitable in the short term.”

The dude is rich.  So to me, rather than get all the messages on articles about donations, I wonder why he can't put a little more money in.  Although I'm glad the media outlet still exists.