Washington Blade - Circulation and Demographics

Circulation and Demographics

The Washington Blade was published weekly on Fridays with a circulation of 33,874 printed copies of each edition. News coverage focuses mainly on global and regional political issues concerning LGBT persons with additional coverage of entertainment and nightlife in the Washington, D.C. area. The masthead of the printed paper includes the slogan "The gay and lesbian weekly of the national capital area since 1969" and the online masthead proclaims "All the news for your life. And your style." Distribution of the Blade includes locations throughout the Washington, D.C. area. Additional distribution points are located in Maryland, Virginia, and as far away as Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The newspaper is primarily distributed through free-standing newspaper boxes on street corners, newspaper racks at Metro stations, and in shops and restaurants. The main competition to the Washington Blade in Washington, D.C. is the weekly newsmagazine, Metro Weekly, and nationally the Bay Area Reporter of San Francisco. For a brief period starting in 1979, the Blade also had competition from Blacklight, the city's first African-American gay monthly periodical. Archives of the Washington Blade were maintained at their Washington, D.C. offices and on Microfilm at the Microfilm Reading Room of the Library of Congress, and in the Alternative & Underground Press Collections of ProQuest (formerly called UMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The newspaper is a member of the National Newspaper Association, the National Gay Newspaper Guild, and the Associated Press.

According to a survey conducted by Simmons Market Research in April 2000 for the Washington Blade, the median age of their readership was forty-one and 85% of their readers were between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four years old. 92% of the readership is employed with 70% of the readers in professional and managerial jobs. The median income of readers was $57,200 per year with readers median household income at $84,000. Overall, 79% of the Blade's readership holds a college degree with 42% of the readers holding postgraduate degrees.