American University’s The Eagle Web Editor Ethan Klapper alerts us to the fact that The Washington Independent is signing off. Read the farewell letter and explanation here.

An excerpt from TWI‘s goodbye post:

TWI was not just a journalistic experiment; it was also a financial one, and ultimately, the successes of the former couldn’t sustain the strains of the latter. Our first year was marked by a kind of exceptionalism, the feeling that we were expanding as other newsrooms were contracting, that this new model of journalism would survive as our dead-tree colleagues struggled. But in the end, we fell prey to the recession just like everyone else.

> Update: These are fast times on Twitter. Firedoglake’s Spencer Ackerman tweeted at the exact same time as Klapper. Ackerman’s TWI news was then retweeted by — who else — Slate‘s Dave Weigel.