Washington City Paper
newspaper in Washington, D.C.
The Washington City Paper is an American alternative weekly newspaper founded in 1981 to serve the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The newspaper is focused on local news and arts. In 2006, when the City Paper was a print publication distributed on Thursdays, it had an average circulation of 85,588. It was purchased in 2017 by Mark Ein and became an online-only publication in May 2022.
History
The Washington City Paper was started in 1981 by Russ Smith and Alan Hirsch, the owners of the Baltimore City Paper. For its first year it was called 1981: Washington's Alternative Newspaper. The name was changed to City Paper in January 1982 and in December 1982 Smith and Hirsch sold 80% of it to Chicago Reader, Inc. In 1988, Chicago Reader, Inc. acquired the remaining 20% interest. In July 2007 both the Washington City Paper and the Chicago Reader were sold to the Tampa-based Creative Loafing chain.
“Washington City Paper” enters the record as newspaper in Washington, D.C. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Washington, City and Paper can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7971727. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 2006, 2017 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Washington City Paper” 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.