The Blade, Washington DC’s weekly homosexualist newspaper, celebrated its 40th anniversary last month. It was America’s oldest gay newspaper and was billed the gay community newspaper of record. Today it ceased publication, as did three other Windows Media titles, all gay publications. The Washington Times has the story. However, the Washington City Paper reports that newly unemployed Blade staff will start a new publication under a different name. As Tim Marchman notes:
The main problem of course is that there was no viable business model. The gay alt papers had always been built on a base of display ads targeted at GLBT readers, classifieds and sex ads. Partly because of broad changes having to do with the Internet but especially because the papers were after all for a sophisticated urban gay audience disproportionately likely to use Craigslist, Yelp et al, there just wasn’t a revenue base.
