Biography|Mark Ein — The Week He Bought the City Paper on I Street

Washington City Paper has been the District's alternative weekly since 1981, when it began life under the name 1981.

By December 2017 the paper was owned by Nashville-based SouthComm and was for sale.

On 21 and 22 December 2017 Ein announced an agreement to buy it.

The terms were not disclosed.

The deal was expected to close in the first week of January 2018.

The paper's newsroom sat at 1400 I Street NW, Suite 900, a downtown office block at 14th and I, not a historic print plant.

Alexa Mills stayed on as editor.

Ein assembled a group of former City Paper journalists and a separate circle of local business backers.

He framed the purchase as an attempt to keep a local newsroom alive rather than as a media trophy.

The paper had already passed through Chicago Reader, Creative Loafing, and SouthComm.

A Washington Post account later put the price, including the office lease, around $50,000 — a number that described a distressed weekly, not a prestige asset.

Ein is a living subject. Statements he made that week are paraphrased here from contemporaneous reports.

1400 I Street is a commercial office building.

The pin is the public address the paper itself printed as headquarters at the time of the sale.

What matters on this corner is not architecture.

It is the fact that a Chevy Chase-raised investor chose to own the city's remaining alt-weekly instead of letting the sale go to another consolidator.

Photo: Hameltion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons