For perhaps the first time in its 31-year history, Washington City Paper plans to let the facts slide in favor of letting its writers’ imaginations run truly untethered, as it plans to run a fiction issue in early 2013.

City Paper employees learned this afternoon they will take a 5 percent pay cut and that the private-equity firm that owns the alt-weekly is looking to sell it, along with publications in Chicago and Atlanta.

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…