The Washington Blade was founded in 1969 as a black and white, one-sheet community newsletter distributed in D.C. -area bars. In October 2009, the Blade celebrated its 40th anniversary as an award-winning news source with a large following in print and online. Readers locally and around the world have come to rely on the Blades unmatched coverage of LGBT news, earning the paper the moniker "the newspaper of record for the LGBT community."