End of an era? Washington Blade closed

The Washington Blade, a 40-year-old gay newspaper in DC, was abruptly closed by its owner, Window Media, on Monday, along with several of the chain's other local LGBT papers. Windows Media filed for bankruptcy. See Washington Post, Washington City Paper, and Queerty.

Within hours, Blade employees (former employees?) pledged that they would, in some form, continue the publication.

This afternoon, the Washington Post reports:

At a coffee shop Tuesday morning in the lobby of the office building that was their former home, Kevin Naff, the Blade's editor, convened his staff -- now volunteers -- handed out assignments and made plans for a vastly scaled-down issue.

...

Naff said he and other former Blade staffers have been inundated with offers of help, from landlords willing to donate office space to freelance writers willing to work for free.

It looks as if the immediate product will be a Kinko's job, funded out of pocket; whether some investor jumps in to pay for the thing for real (incl 20 salaries, etc), remains to be seen.

Update: Zach of TheNewGay.net writes:

The Blade’s insistence on only covering the most vapid, the most A-list, the most anti-intellectual, camp-at-all-costs, male dominated aspects of our life have done real and lasting damage to the 90% of us who don’t fit so narrow a rubric.