Print Subscribers Cry Foul Over WP's Online-Only Story 96
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by
timothy
from the wonder-how-they-feel-about-online-coupons dept.
from the wonder-how-they-feel-about-online-coupons dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The decision by the Washington Post to publish an article exclusively online has angered many readers who still pay for the print edition of the newspaper and highlighted the thorny issues newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences. The 7,000 word story about the slaying in 2006 of Robert Wone, a young lawyer who was found stabbed to death in a luxurious townhouse in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington where a 'polyamorous family' of three men lived, is the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age and many editors agree that print is still the place to publish deep investigative reporting, in part to give certain readers a reason to keep paying for news. 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print,' said newspaper consultant Mark Potts. 'This just felt like a nice two-part series that they didn't have the room to put in the paper, so they just threw it on the Web.' Editors at The Post say they considered publishing the article in print, but they concluded it was too long at a time when the paper, like most others, was in dire financial straits and trying to scale back newsprint costs. 'Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet,' wrote one reader in a letter to the editor. 'As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.'"
Re:long-form reporting...deep investigative report (Score:3, Informative)
"Long-form reporting" and "deep investigative reporting" means "reporting the way it used to be done before we just started ripping the stories off newswire. Since now everyone can read the newswire, once in a while we have to send a reporter to actually do some... [gasp]... reporting."
The Reason it wasn't n Print: It wasn't Very Good (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, the story wasn't very good. There was no lede. There were no breaks in the case reported for the first time by the paper. The main thing it had going for it was group sex. The strong implication of the article was that the police thought these three guys were guilty because they were into kinky group sex and S&M. Then when it came time to actually prove something, there was all-too-common in DC story of police labs losing evidence and screwing up.
I'm sure the Post editors compared this sensationalist story with the Chandry Levy expose they printed maybe a years ago (which I understand actually led to someone being arrested), and found it lacked oomph. There was no there there as an old boss used to say. Combine that with the obvious homophobia of the police detectives initially assigned to the case, and the whole thing was a muddled morass of conflicting information. Clearly the housemates were not entirely forthcoming and that their stories were not entirely consistent, but there was no clear evidence that they committed murder either.
Re:I used to like the Washington Post online.... (Score:3, Informative)
I would be interested if anyone knows the dirt on why exactly he was fired. [snip] he was starting to be a pretty merciless critic of the Obama administration
You answered yourself. His boss(es) liked the previous eight years' material, and were shocked and dismayed that he was a good journalist instead of the biased one they thought he was. Of course, they might actually think he _became_ biased.