We just received this leaked Erik Wemple e-mail from the City Paper’s newsroom:

Hey fellows: Could you forward this to your freelancers?

Dear City Paper freelancers: As you may have heard by now, Washington City Paper has been acquired by the company that runs the Creative Loafing papers of Atlanta, Charlotte, Sarasota, and Tampa. We are pleased with this development and have had great discussions with our new owner, Ben Eason. The obvious question that people have been asking is, how does this affect the paper and what we’ve been doing for so long? There will no doubt be changes in how our product is generated, distributed, marketed, and so on. And our new owner will keep us on the path of editorial budget cuts that we embarked upon earlier this year. That is a simple fact of life in this industry. As to the impact on freelancers, I cannot say at this point precisely what it’ll be. Given how the Creative chain deals with production, we may see a rejiggering of editorial deadlines, but I can’t say for sure right now. And we have no plans to change pay for freelancers at this point, either. Also unchanged is our appreciation for all that you do for this paper, week in and week out. I will send out more information as it becomes available.

More to come on the why.