The Washington Business Journal reported yesterday that the Washington Convention Center will be officially renamed to honor D.C.'s first elected mayor, Walter E. Washington. Apparently the D.C. Council approved the name change last year, though we can't recall having heard about it at the time. The idea is a fine one though, and Washington is certainly worthy of having his legacy honored. So what's the problem? As of Nov. 5, the building will officially become......

>> Don't forget: thousands of dirty hippies and the gun-toting maniacs who hate them are getting together for a big ol' hootenanny down on the National Mall tomorrow morning. It's the War on War on War. >> At the Washington City Paper, editorial assistants who make mistakes aren't just named, they're taken out back and tortured with one million paper cuts using the latest issue while Erik Wemple screams "you're not good enough to......

Via Editor & Publisher, the Washington City Paper, along with the Chicago Reader, which the City Paper owns, has been sold to Atlanta-based company Creative Loafing, publisher of four other alternative weeklies in Atlanta, Tampa, Sarasota, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C. The City Paper name will remain in place, despite the other four papers all carrying the "Creative Loafing" name. In a post to the City Paper's staff blog, City Desk, Senior Editor Mike DeBonis said......

Since they were apparently sick of all the best scoops going to the Post, the folks at the City Paper have been nice enough to grant us a little nugget of information -- Mike DeBonis, currently Senior Editor at the alt-weekly, will become the newest Loose Lips columnists. As you may recall, in late June James Jones stepped down as author of the vital local politics column, choosing to move on to a stint at......

>> Vice President Dick Cheney is claiming that, for the purposes of securing classified information, his office is not part of the executive branch. Exactly which branch are you in then, Mr. Vice President? [Raw Story] >> Are you ready for another severe thunderstorm alert? The National Weather Service just issued one from now until 10 p.m. >> There's a book launch party tonight for Murray Waas' The United States vs. I. Lewis Libby. Somehow......

Since 1983, Loose Lips, the City Paper's weekly local politics column, has been the place to get quirky news and commentary on the District's political figures. But today, James Jones, Loose Lips columnist for the last two years, bids farewell to the paper. Jones came to the City Paper after a stint at WAMU, and his first column was published on March 11, 2005. According to the folks at the City Paper, Jones has taken......

Happy Friday morning, D.C. If you're like us, today is payday, and maybe you're feeling pretty good about the number of digits in your bank account. Perhaps you even plan to go out and make a major purchase this weekend, like say, finally upgrading that crappy stereo system you bought from K-mart before you started college. Maybe you're even smiling at your desk right this second, thinking of how proud you are to have saved......

If you're into the Washington City Paper, approach this week's issue with care -- it's not a quick read. This week the city's premiere alternative weekly profiles investigative journalist Murray Waas, using some 21,514 words over the course of three articles to attack his journalistic standards and detail a long-running feud between the paper's staff and Waas. If that many words don't mean much to you, think of it this way -- only 11,000 or......

Cue sounds of cats hissing at each other. The latest issue of the Washington City Paper contains not one but two tongue lashings of Ward 1 D.C. Council member Jim Graham. The first, a lengthy cover story by Jessica Gould, nicely summarized in the subtitle: "Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham never met a misbehaving nightclub that blanket legislation couldn’t fix," details Graham's latest crusade against nightclubs -- an issue we've certainly talked about before.......

Last week the City Paper reported on moves to ban the sale of single beers along the up-and-coming H Street stretch in Northeast, part of an attempt to reduce the quality of life crimes, like public urination or disorderly conduct, that seemingly go hand-in-hand with 24-ounce cans of Bud Ice and 40-ounce bottles of Old English Malt Liquor. Of course, the proposal is nothing new -- Mt. Pleasant adopted a similar ban in 2001, and......

What do you do when you, the dutiful copy editor, is are forced to adhere to an in-house style that flies in the face of the rules of grammar you hold in such high esteem? You blog about it. Andrew Beaujon, the City Paper's Copy Editor, seems to have had enough. In a witheringly comical post he published on the paper's blog yesterday, Beaujon takes issue with the "serial comma." He writes: I hate the......

It's times like these that we miss the real scandals -- oral sex in the Oval Office, lobbyists corrupting members of Congress, crack-smoking mayors, and so on. Instead we have...Wemplegate 2006. Or so is known a developing, ummmm, scandal involving the City Paper's head honcho, Erik Wemple and his wife, freelancer Stephanie Mencimer. Intrigue there isn't, but there's thrown dog feces, a personal crusade against a pet spa, and some vicious written tirades. We'd boil......

When it comes to stemming the tide of decreases in daily circulation, the Post is willing to try just about anything. And today in the Metro section, they did just that. The Post today rolled out their new "Page 3" feature in the Metro section, a page dedicated less to news and more to personal stories and reflections on life in the Washington area. Wrote the Post yesterday of the new feature: [Page 3] is......

It was just two weeks ago that City Paper Editor in Chief Erik Wemple announced he'd be moving on up in the world, heading up to New York to take the helm of the famed Village Voice. We guessed it wouldn't be long until he was back in D.C. -- and we were right. Well, to be fair, he never really even got started. He was set to take over the paper on July 24,......

City Paper Editor Jumps Ship: This won't do anything for the District's morale. Gawker and WJLA are reporting the Erik Wemple, the City Paper's Editor in Chief, has been hired away by New York's Village Voice. Wemple has manned the helm of the City Paper since January 2002, and has long been known in D.C. for his biting cutdowns of the Post. We'll miss Wemple, but we're sure it'll only be a few months......

It was just a few weeks back that the Washington City Paper completed a long overdue overhaul to their website, and now they have followed many a mainstream media mainstay before them and jumped on the blogging bandwagon. It wasn't long ago that the CPers were complaining about the prospect; in a March 17th piece on Washington Post blogging requirements without additional pay, City Paper editor Erik Wemple noted, "Full disclosure: The Washington City Paper......

We hope you had a good weekend Washington. This photo was taken by DCist's Kyle Gustafson at The Futureheads' show at the 9:30 Club on Saturday. Read our review of that show and Spoon's performance on Friday. In the meantime, here's what you may have missed on DCist over the past few days. -- Current newspapers to wed Voice of the Hill. -- Have you ever wondered what it's like to prod a poodle with......

Sorry for the lack of posts today. This DCist was run off the road by a black Volvo while biking yesterday after work up near Battery Kemble Park. We're OK, for the most part (no broken bones), but our body really hurts after hitting a tree. So we're at home in bed (laptop nearby) and Kyra Phillips' voice on CNN is starting to cause acute ringing in our ears. Additionally, when we read the City......

Oh my. Looky here! We've found the Holy Grail for the metropolitan blogging world: a parttime blogging position that will be PAID. Not with cigarettes, booze or minimal beatings -- but with actual money! And you don't even have to talk about politics. Read now; you can thank us later. Elizabeth Spiers, the newly appointed head honcho over at mediabistro.com (a site dedicated to resources for everything, anything, and anyone media-related) is looking for a......