Tomorrow will be your last chance to do that, though; McKenna has opted to stop writing Cheap Seats and move on from City Paper. As McKenna announces his decision in his column for this week's paper, which will be his last:

This will be the last Cheap Seats column. In our 25 years and 51 weeks together, City Paper and I have gotten everything out of each other we’re going to get. I’m grateful for all the people who told me their stories, and anybody who ever read my attempts to retell those tales in this space, and, well, anybody who didn’t read but sued me anyway. Be well...

Editor Michael Schaffer sent staff an email about McKenna's departure today:

This is a really sad day for City Paper. I've worked with Dave in various iterations, separated by a dozen or so years, and I can say he's been one of the most consistently stellar journalists I've ever read, much less edited. In a way, it's a shame that the last year has been so defined by Dave's bravery in the face of legal threats from a billionaire celebrity, because so much of the real magic in his column was his ability to discover and champion the powerless and the forgotten. Yes, he's often seemed to be the only one questioning the most powerful sports juggernaut in town. But when you go through his collected works, also look for one-armed superstar catcher Gary Mays, Kentucky Derby winner turned $8-a-race Laurel Park pony boy Ronnie Franklin, and the schoolgirl athletes whose sorry treatment Dave chronicled.

Anyone who's had the fortune of editing Dave, or just shooting around ideas with him, also knows that Dave's also one of those guys who manages, in just about every interaction, to make colleagues smarter, funnier, more suspicious and more empathetic—exactly what journalists should be. I first experienced this back in the days when a long phone call with Dave was likely to be interrupted by a guitar solo (amplified through a tube amp). These days, said calls are more likely to feature ambient noise from his kids, but the same thing applies. You laugh, you argue, and you underestimate his ability to fact-check the all-Met or NFL-veteran claims of elected officials at your peril. Bottom line: Dave's someone I'm proud to work with. And, even though he's dropping the column as a staff writer, I still want to get Dave's voice in the paper as a contributor (and on the other end of my phone as a friend) as often as he wants.

Pick up tomorrow's paper to see who earns McKenna's final Unsportsman of the Year honors.

Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder has just filed papers in D.C. Superior Court to dismiss his lawsuit against Washington City Paper and staff writer Dave McKenna over "The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder," which we published last November.

Since Snyder first sued over the story, City Paper and McKenna fought the case aggressively, eventually asking a D.C. Superior Court judge to dismiss it under the District's new law against "strategic lawsuits against public participation." And of course, we've also continued to write about the Redskins—which, of course, we'll keep doing.

Here's our statement on Saturday's news:

We are pleased that Dan Snyder has finally ended his gratuitous litigation against Washington City Paper and staff writer Dave McKenna.

From the beginning, we have believed that Snyder's lawsuit was a baseless one, designed to intimidate a journalist and a publication that have been among his most persistent critics. We've also argued—in our pages, and in court—that our article never said any of the allegedly libelous things Snyder claimed it did. As we defended ourselves, we got unprecedented support from loyal readers who donated thousands of dollars of their own money to help us protect our rights. And we were fortunate to have an ownership group who understood the stakes and stood by us. We're confident that the court would have seen things our way, too, thanks to the strong laws the District of Columbia has in place to protect free speech. But we're also glad that it won't have to go that far.

City Paper is a small news organization with limited resources, and defending ourselves against this lawsuit has cost massive amounts of time and money, well beyond the $34,308.91 that readers have contributed to our legal defense fund. Despite those costs, we are proud that we never wavered or allowed ourselves to be bullied, ultimately leading Snyder to dismiss his case. Though the District’s anti-SLAPP law says courts “may” have awarded us some of our litigation costs had we pursued them, we concluded that it wasn’t worth spending substantially more money, energy, and attention for what would have only been a chance of recovering a portion of what we've spent.

Today, we got what we wanted all along: dismissal of a case expressly designed to pressure us, and filed by a man who now apparently says he never even read the story in the first place. Now we're eager to get back to our business of covering the city's politics and culture—including its sports culture—without this distraction. And we hope the end of this case means Snyder can get back to focusing his energy on making our shared home team as good as it can be.

When Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder sued Washington City Paper's parent companies in February in New York courts over "The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder," we said the suit had no merit. When Snyder dropped the New York case and moved it to D.C. courts in April, suing City Paper and staff writer Dave McKenna, we said it still had no merit.

Today, we're asking a judge to agree with us.

Our lawyers just filed papers under the District's anti-SLAPP law, which the D.C. Council passed in December and which took effect in early April. Among other purposes, the law is designed to protect news organizations against lawsuits intended to intimidate them out of writing about public figures. The law requires the case to be dismissed unless Snyder can prove that he is "likely to succeed" on the merits of his complaint.

As our court filing puts it:

Not only has [Snyder] publicly acknowledged the improper purposes that in fact undergird this litigation, but his ever-shifting explication of why the Commentary is allegedly actionable in defamation further reveals his lawsuit for what it is—a pretext for punishing and silencing his critics. As demonstrated in the materials accompanying this motion, Mr. Snyder has moved from complaining publicly about statements that, on inspection, appear nowhere in the Commentary; to suing over artwork that any first-year law student knows is not the proper basis for a defamation action; to his current Complaint, which wrenches out of context substantially accurate accounts of his prior conduct, themselves drawn from the voluminous archives of public records and previously published press accounts that document his public life, and ascribes to them allegedly defamatory meanings that no reasonable reader would credit. Simply put, Mr. Snyder cannot demonstrate that it is even arguable he can succeed on the merits of his current claims, much less that he is, as the Anti-SLAPP Act requires, likely to do so.

Read the motion, and a memorandum of law supporting it, below. If you're having trouble viewing the files on our site, view them here.

An affidavit supporting the motion is here:

And the 204 exhibits we filed with the court are here, in four parts:

For information on City Paper's legal defense fund, click here.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Me? I was at the City Paper offices on the morning of June 19, 1986. At the time, I was an intern doing arts listings in the paper's headquarters, a small rowhouse on 6th Street NW which for reasons that mystify me still stands.

It was hot and I was sweaty, as per usual. I went out to get something soft to drink at a liquor store down the block, and the guy behind the counter asked me if I liked basketball.

I said yes, with goofy enthusiasm.

"You like Len Bias?" he said.

"I love Len Bias!" I told him, even goofier and with absolute earnestness.

"He's dead," the clerk said.

So 25 years ago Sunday, if you saw a soggy white guy crying into a bottle of seltzer water in Chinatown, maybe that was me.

Snyder's suit was filed late Wednesday—curiously, in New York, rather than in any of the Washington-area jurisdictions where City Paper circulates.

Earlier in the day, City Paper publisher Amy Austin published a letter to readers defending columnist Dave McKenna's reporting. The Snyder suit specifies four alleged misstatements in the story, and also claims that a cover illustration depicting Snyder with horns and a goatee was anti-Semitic. We expect the claims to be defended vigorously. We've also made clear that we think the allegation of bigotry is sensationalistic and absurd.

The bottom line is: It's sad that Snyder, who has such a public relations apparatus at his disposal, has chosen to turn to litigation instead—especially in a court deep in Giants country.

Read Snyder's full complaint after the jump.

"How would you react if you were vilified by an anti-Semitic caricature of you?" Donovan asks. The letter calls the cover illustration "extremely insulting, offensive, and disturbing."

Where, exactly, to begin with that? For the record: The story didn't mention Snyder's religion at all. And the illustration is meant to resemble the type of scribbling that teenagers everywhere have been using to deface photos for years. The image of Snyder doesn't look like an "anti-Semitic caricature"—it looks like a devil.

But we at City Paper take accusations of anti-Semitism seriously—in part because many of us are Jewish, including staffers who edited the story and designed the cover. So let us know, Mr. Snyder, when you want to fight the real anti-Semites.

SkyKam, January 26, 4:44 pm

Through the Congress Heights Main Streets project, founded two years ago, they're trying to bring new investment to the community, in Ward 8. DHS will move its headquarters there from Tenleytown within a few years, and the neighborhood is trying to capitalize on the construction and the estimated 14,000 jobs that will arrive with the department. The area needs it badly; the average unemployment rate in Ward 8, according to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, was 26.5 percent.

The Congress Heights Main Streets project, which extends from Fourth St. Southeast to Milwaukee Pl. Southeast, wants to create a cleaner and safer environments around the 58 businesses in that community.

“As you know when you ride around the city there are different neighborhoods that looked bad and now they look good,” says James Bunn, chairman of the Congress Heights Main Streets project. “Our intention is to have a corridor that looks like Barracks Row.”

Bunn, who is a Ward 8 resident and chairman of the ward's business council, has owned the Bunn Building at 3127 Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave SE since 1970. He and other Congress Heights Main Streets organizers say they want to create a cleaner, and safer, neighborhood for the 58 businesses in the area now. They hope that, in turn, will mean in more restauranteurs and other businesses move in.

So far, Bunn says three or four businesses in the neighborhood have already been renovated by business owners. The D.C. Council's Committee on Economic Development, which is chaired by At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown (the all-but-certain next council chairman), allocated $150,000 to the Congress Heights Main Streets project in May of this year, to try to help those efforts. Brown says it's a “shame” revitalization efforts were not organized earlier in Congress Heights: “It's time to get the improvements in town that we get downtown.”

During a press conference on Friday, in front of a Chinese food carry-out called Hong Kong, Bunn advised business owners in the neighborhood not to sell their property "for a few bucks." Within 12 to 18 months, he says, the construction of the Department of Homeland Security building will raise property values for business owners and residents. "We want them to be a part of the new money that is coming," Bunn says.

The take-out place's entrance was recently renovated by Chosen Contractors, a company owned by Tinamarie Spencer, who grew up in Congress Heights and graduated from Ballou Senior High School. Spencer says she went for an “Adams Morgan feel” for the re-design of the storefront to bring sophistication to Congress Heights. She says she's excited by the opportunity to “give something back to her community.”

“[Residents are] so used to having everything run down or having second hand work,” she says. “So I wanted to give them something that they deserve.”

Adams Morgan, August 26

The nominees and categories include Darrow Montgomery for photography; Young & Hungry columnist Tim Carman for food writing; former Editor Erik Wemple for media reporting/criticism; former Loose Lips columnist Mike DeBonis for short-form news story; writer Jason Cherkis for his innovative format buster "How the District's Children Die"; The Sexist columnist Amanda Hess for her daily blog; online producer Ted Scheinman, alongside Wemple and Montgomery, for the multimedia extravaganza "D.C.'s Biggest Party in Pictures"; not to mention the whole damn staff for this here City Desk blog.

The winners will be announced during AAN's 33rd Annual Convention on July 16 in Toronto.

Does this picture make you sad? I call it Last Robin of Spring

One time in an edit meeting, Erik Wemple said I'd make a terrible profile subject. Drawing a line on a piece of paper, he put me at one end and Jonathan Rees at the other. Rees was too nuts, he said (paraphrasing here) and I was too boring. The ideal City Paper subject, he posited, straddled the center of this continuum. He was right about all three things, so I'll try to keep this goodbye brief.

This is the best job I've ever had. I choose that superlative carefully. Here, I've been privileged to work with the best reporters and critics, the best photographer, the best co-workers, and the best stories I've ever known. I came here from magazines, where fact-checkers sweep up behind writers whose primary talent is being good at parties. I took my first correction not long after landing and realized I had learned next to nothing about journalism in the previous decade. The joy of this job isn't turning out product reviews between languid lunches, it's telling stories well and getting the details right, week after week, day after day.

Here I learned to despise trend pieces and Q&As, but more important I learned that often the best way to tell a big story is through a small one. I learned that puns don't work as headlines on the Internet (just try searching for an old District Line EVEN IF you know the jokey hed! (e.g.: 1, 2). And I learned the importance of chronicling crushed dreams.

Like this one! After City Paper was purchased by Creative Loafing in July 2007, it became a different place. We lost half of our staff to budget cuts, and those and the recession let the air out of many of the paper's cherished traditions–great copy-editing and general-assignment writers, for example. For a while, we mourned. Then we started finding the humor in the situation (some people never got the joke, which to me is the hallmark of a good City Paper comedy piece). Then we tried to figure out what we could do well given the circumstances. Results have been mixed, but Internet-wise, I'm proud of where we stand in relation to our early attempts.

I'm going to miss this project, you know, the one where we keep trying to figure out how to inject the alt-weekly DNA into what's now a daily, vertical-driven publication. And I'll miss the bike commute (new office is too close to my house). But mostly I'm gonna miss the people I worked with, even the ones who sometimes made me bash my head into my screen. For all of you, here's another anecdote from a meeting: In a plenary session, one person who has managed this company said that life was like a crap sandwich. The more bread you have, he said, the less crap you have to eat. I wish my coworkers, their sharp new editor, and the people on our business side nothing but bread.

I will stay in touch with them, but it'll be harder to stay in touch with the readers, who I love in a way that may not always be apparent to those of you who've called to yell at me. (Except the guy who screamed for 27 minutes and threatened to "expose" me after I said I didn't know why our receptionist had trouble transferring me his call: You, pal, can kiss my ass.) Now I'm gonna become one of you, which is more comfort than one usually gets in a goodbye. I'll miss the view from this side of the WordPress interface, but I can't wait to see what the people with the best job in the world do next.

Life is coming full circle for best-selling author Michael Schaffer. "The first story I wrote at Washington City Paper, I was living with my parents at the time," he says. "I think I'll be staying with them again during this transition, although I better ask them first."

The 36-year-old D.C. native and City Paper alum, currently living in Philadelphia, was named the paper's new editor on Monday. (Schaffer and his family will be moving back to the D.C. area as soon as he can find a place, or gets sick of riding Megabus, or whichever comes first.)

"I'm sort of over the moon right now," Schaffer tells City Desk. "City Paper was the first job I ever had and the most fun I've ever had at a job. I cherish the place."

His appointment plugs a nagging gap at the top of the masthead left by former editor Erik Wemple's departure in March.

Schaffer, who previously worked as a reporter and senior editor at the paper from 1997 to 2000 (before slumming it at U.S. News & World Report and, later, the Philadelphia Inquirer), met with editorial staffers over lunch last week, a powwow he described as encouraging.

Schaffer says one early priority will be filling some of the holes caused by a spate of previously announced staff departures, including several City Paper stalwarts, such as managing editor Andrew Beaujon, senior writer Jason Cherkis and Loose Lips columnist Mike DeBonis.

"A lot of really good people," Schaffer says. "But I also see it as an opportunity to bring on board some people who I feel comfortable with, and who the staff feel comfortable with ... who have strengths that I might not have."

In accepting the post, Schaffer will be taking the reins of an almost entirely different beast than the one he left a decade ago. But he's just fine with that.

"In my life, I tend to not believe in going back," Schaffer says. "One of the things that is most exciting to me about it is, even though it is still Washington City Paper and some things are the same, a lot is really different and it's a very different organization that I'm taking over. It's a multi-platform media organization. I'm not one of these nostaglic people who's trapped in the Why Can't Everything Be Just Like It Was in 1984 kind of mentality. I'm really keen on making the paper, as well as the web site, as excellent as they can be."

Herewith, the official press release from company headquarters:

Washington City Paper Welcomes Noted Journalist Home As Editor

(April 26, 2010, Washington, DC) – Michael Schaffer, a DC native, best-selling author, and an editor and writer whose assignments have taken him from Afghanistan to Adams Morgan, has been named editor of the Washington City Paper.

City Paper Publisher Amy Austin, in announcing Schaffer's appointment, called attention to his previous experience in Washington, including three and a half years at the City Paper as a reporter and senior editor from 1997 to 2000.

"Michael honed his journalistic talent at City Paper and then went on to further develop his skills at US News & World Report and the Philadelphia Inquirer," Austin said. "We are so pleased to welcome him home as our editor."

As editor, Schaffer will have overall responsibility for the content of the Washington City Paper, one of the nation's best known urban weeklies, and its website. The City Paper was founded in 1981 as an alternative to the traditional press. It focuses its coverage on life and politics in the nation's capital.

Last year, Schaffer's first book, "One Nation Under Dog," a critically acclaimed examination of America's mania for pets, was published by Henry Holt & Co. Schaffer spent two years on the project, which combines investigative reporting, narrative journalism, and cultural history.

Previously, Schaffer spent four years as a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. In addition to coverage of local politics and corruption, he covered the 2004 Presidential election and spent time in Iraq. Knight-Ridder Newspapers recognized his Iraq coverage with the James K. Batten Excellence Award in 2003

Schaffer joined the Inquirer from US News, where he served on the national and world news staff from 2000 to 2002. He was dispatched to Pakistan for the fall of 2001, and also reported from a dozen US states, covering the 2000 Florida recount, poverty issues, and scandals in the Catholic Church.

Schaffer's freelance work has appeared in Slate, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, The Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New York Press, Obituary Magazine, Philadelphia, and Men's Journal.

"I grew up reading City Paper, and later got my first job in journalism there," Schaffer said. "Back then, we printed a paper weekly; now, we also update a website 24/7. I'm incredibly excited about tackling the new media landscape while using the values I learned here at the start of my career: Curiosity, fearlessness, humor, and a deep knowledge of the city we call home."

###

Washington City Paper is one of six of America's leading urban weeklies owned by CL Inc. The group also includes the Chicago Reader, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Creative Loafing Tampa, Creative Loafing Charlotte, and Creative Loafing Sarasota. CL Inc.'s holdings also include websites associated with those newspaper properties, the Straight Dope (straightdope.com) and Listen.com sites, and the Digital Advertising Network.

Photo by Ryan Donnell

It was a good discussion, the lede turned out well, and the 12,000-word story ended up winning us a nice prize.

We don't do that stuff anymore—summoning groups of people to obsess over the fine points of storytelling. If we're lucky enough to get a long-form story from one of our freelancers, we edit it in a vacuum, in between blog posts and tweets. Hopefully it'll make sense once it hits the paper and the Web.

Oh well.

There's not much to lament here. Moving from a weekly frequency to one that refreshes washingtoncitypaper.com many, many times per day has been a blast. Perhaps the greatest input-output machine civilization has ever seen, the Web rewards news, original thought, and finely articulated outrage. When we manage to pull off any of those things, the feedback is immediate and engaging. Compare that to the grind of yore, in which we'd drop a big stack of words on the public every Thursday. Those stories would routinely "bounce like a box of rocks," in the words of a former colleague.

Of course, we still do put out a weekly paper—it's just that it rarely has that gaping cover hole and often has content republished from our Web site. Though the double-platform world often feels tyrannical, it's more often exhilarating. Anything that demands more writing, more editing, more riffing on headlines, more collaboration with the staff—that's more fun for me.

The Boilerplate Editor Farewell Letter requires at least several expressions of gratitude, and who am I to break this particular mold? So here goes.

Thanks to our readers. Without you, we wouldn't have this shaky business model that we've been trying to fix for several years now. I've closely observed you in cafes, restaurants, and Chipotle, grabbing Washington City Paper and flipping straight to the ads and the syndicated content with which my editorial staff and I have nothing to do. Yet I still love you. You are motivated, smart, clever, and hip people, though I'd appreciate it if you showed more of those attributes in the comments section.

Thanks to my sources. Yesterday marked the end of the coverage of local media under this byline. Over eight years, I've written about many local outlets, including the Washington Times, the Examiner, the Washingtonian, the InTowner, the Northwest Current and so on. The preoccupation of the coverage, though, has been the Washington Post, an outfit that's one of the easiest conversation starters in the region. In recent months, I've had numerous discussions with friends in the industry, and the feedback I get about the paper is pretty uniform: The Post has dropped to a new low, it's missing key stories, it's boring, it's [insert other pejorative comment here]. There's no question that the newsroom has lost some bandwidth via four buyouts and general attrition. Yet it remains the greatest bargain in the household budget of my family—and we are aggressive Costco shoppers. How do I reach this clinical determination? Easily: There's a stack of old Post sections sitting on my bedstand; they represent all the stuff that I didn't get a chance to read in the morning before rushing out, plus all the stuff I didn't read on the Web during work. I try to plow through them before I fall asleep at night, and I never make it through the pile. The point here is that the Post is giving me more interesting stories—coverage I really want to read—than I can possibly digest. So there.

Before I started covering the Post, I wondered how I'd get sources. A friend told me, "They'll help you," referring to staffers at the paper. He was right—Post journalists, for the most part, welcome scrutiny of their work. Despite my rantings about the Brauchli Doctrine, named for current Executive Editor Marcus, the paper remains a transparent and accountable place. To all the people at the paper who have trusted me with their accounts of internal deliberations and a fistfight, un abrazo.

Thanks to my colleagues. This is the part I really can't write without breaking down, so I gotta call it a day. Plus, it's a Friday afternoon and the audience for this thing is dying. I'm just going to post it—no updates or followups this time.

The Washington Post, deploying just about everyone on staff to the story, including a feature on how families are coping, stuff on how funeral directors are coping, a piece on who won the local TV ratings (WRC-TV), and so much more.

The Washington City Paper, nailing coverage of snow-removal efforts, debates over the privatization of snow removal, in-depth reporting on disparities among streets, the whole Maria Lewis/"Louis" thing, and so much more.

The Examiner, on frustrations piling up around the region, not to mention Harry Jaffe scolding Chris Matthews for his Buffalo-Miami spiel.

Jaffe nails the classic commuter-tax angle to slam Matthews for his dig at the District for failing to clear the snow fast enough, or at all:

Most of the [complaints] came from District residents. They are valid criticisms of city agencies and workers who had to try to clear perhaps the most snow ever dropped on the District, since George Washington made it the seat of the federal government around 1800. Chalk it up to the push and shove between the government and the governed.

But when I hear talking face Chris Matthews gripe about the city's snow clearing capabilities, I'd like to shove a sock in his big mouth. Filling his MSNBC show with more nonsense than usual Wednesday night, Matthews called D.C. "a city that can't plow its streets."

Jaffe then says that if Matthews, when driving in from his "Montgomery County manse," just paid a toll at the border, perhaps Mayor Adrian M. Fenty could buy some more "rigs" and get the job done to Matthews' specs.

City dwellers are always a provincial lot. They live in tight quarters and feel entitled to lash out at people who live in plusher areas. Add to that the historic and exclusive injustices of serving as a resident of the District of Columbia: You have no meaningful representation in Congress; everyone in the region essentially pisses on you; and you have high taxes and bad schools. So when an outsider assails you and your people, the outsider is going to hear it. Expect the Matthews slams to continue into the weekend, along with temperatures in the 30s.