Steve Cavendish Is the New Editor of Washington City Paper

Cavendish

Steve Cavendish will be the next editor of Washington City Paper, staffers were told at a meeting on Tuesday. Cavendish, the news editor for the Nashville Scene, edited Nashville’s City Paper until SouthComm, which also owns WCP, closed it in 2013.

“It’s just a tremendous opportunity,” Cavendish says in a phone call. “It’s a great paper. It’s always been a great paper.”

Cavendish, 45, is a Nashville native and has done stints at the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, where he worked from 1999 to 2002.

He helped out with editing Washington City Paper‘s best-of issue in March. The staff “really impressed me” during that period, he says, and he and his wife “eventually overcame our fears of the DC housing market. That took a little longer than everything else.”

SouthComm recently fired longtime City Paper publisher Amy Austin. In an interview with Washingtonian last week, company President Chris Ferrell said he expects an alt-weekly to be “the leading voice for the culture of a city, whether that be in music, food, or the arts” and also said he expects “real quality investigative work.” Mike Madden, who was the paper’s last editor, announced in March he would leave for the Post.

Cavendish will start in June, and he says he and his wife “kind of assume we’ll find something in the District. We like the District a lot.”

I was City Paper’s managing editor from 2006-2010, and Washingtonian Editor Mike Schaffer was City Paper’s editor from 2010-2012.

Andrew Beaujon

Senior editor

Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. His book A Bigger Field Awaits Us: The Scottish Soccer Team That Fought the Great War was published in 2018. He lives in Del Ray.