When Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins, filed a defamation lawsuit against the Washington City Paper in February, readers rushed to show their support — and the newspaper gave them an outlet. The City Paper set up a fund for reader donations meant to offset the litigation fees, collecting 600 donations totaling $28,000 in the first three weeks.

But since the initial influx, the fund has received only 190 donations totaling just over $3,000. With donations slowing to a trickle even as the lawsuit drags on, the paper is left with a fund that matters more for what it has come to represent: tangible evidence of reader loyalty at a time when many newspapers are fighting steep readership declines. Though the fund has not sustained the flood of contributions, its ability to continue to attract donations at all demonstrates what Michael Schaffer, the newspaper’s editor, called the “sense of real, fierce ownership” that City Paper’s readers share.

“We’re not used to getting money directly from readers,” said Amy Austin, the paper’s publisher. The paper, which had an average weekly circulation in 2010 of about 72,300 and receives about 450,000 unique monthly views on its Web site, is not a nonprofit organization, so the donations from readers are not tax-deductible.

Mr. Snyder originally filed the suit against City Paper and its parent companies on Feb. 2 in New York in response to a column by Dave McKenna, “The Cranky Redskins Fan’s Guide to Dan Snyder,” that ran on Nov. 19. He then refiled the suit in April in Washington, dropping one of the parent companies from the suit and adding Mr. McKenna as a defendant.

On June 17, City Paper filed a motion seeking dismissal of Mr. Snyder’s defamation claim on the grounds that his suit was meant to silence the paper by saddling it with unaffordable legal costs. Patricia Glaser, Mr. Snyder’s lead lawyer, said her team would file an opposition to the paper’s motion in the middle of July, which could extend the case further.

Neither legal team would disclose its litigation fees for the case. But with just over $31,000 in the legal defense fund, and annual revenue just shy of $5 million, the paper is concerned by the mounting legal fees. “It costs a significant amount of money to defend a case that is being aggressively litigated,” said Seth Berlin, the paper’s lawyer. “That’s not going to get the City Paper all the way through the case.”

But the existence of the fund continues at least to improve morale. “It’s nice to be reminded that we are a piece of the local culture that people cherish,” Mr. Schaffer said.

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