Gridiron Club
journalism organization based in Washington, D.C.
The Gridiron Club is the oldest and most selective journalistic organization in Washington, D.C.
History
"an elitist social club of sixty print journalists" — Hedrick Smith, Power Game: How Washington Works February 1988 Random House ISBN 9780394554471
Frank A. De Puy (1854–1927) was one of several who met January 24, 1885, at the Welcker's Hotel in Washington, D.C. – 721 15th Street, N.W., between New York Avenue and H Street – to form the Gridiron Club. De Puy was the last surviving founder of the club.
Its 65 active members represent major newspapers, news services, news magazines, and broadcast networks. Membership is by invitation only and was historically almost exclusive to prominent newspaper men, including newspaper Washington bureau chiefs.
For most of its history, the Club bylaws excluded women from becoming members or even guests at its annual dinner. Although the National Press Club began admitting women in 1971, the Gridiron was reluctant to follow suit. Women were first permitted as guests in 1972: several prominent women including several members of Congress, Coretta Scott King, and Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, were invited.
The Gridiron Club elected and admitted the first woman journalist members in 1975: Helen Thomas of United Press International and Frances Lewine of the Associated Press. Thomas would become the club's first woman president in 1993.
Eventually, the club began expanding beyond print journalism to include broadcast media figures such as Tim Russert of NBC News, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, Mara Liasson of National Public Radio, and Judy Woodruff of PBS.
The club merged with its charitable arm, the Gridiron Foundation, in 2008 to form the Gridiron Club and Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Gridiron Club” as journalism organization based in Washington, D.C. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5608632. VIAF identifies the subject as 151337881. The Library of Congress control number is n85184142. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1854, 1927 and 1885.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gridiron Club” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.