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WaPo tries an old trick, and succeeds

By Mark Obbie

There's been much chatter about the Washington Post series "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" Much of that chatter has been on the Post's own site, including the comments attached to a running Reporters' Notebook and in a live chat today with series editor Jeff Leen and reporters Sari Horwitz, Scott Higham, and Sylvia Moreno. Yesterday, the paper's ombudsman chattered about the chatter. (Now, I guess, I'm chattering about the chatter about the chatter.)It's a healthy debate, but enough already! What the Post has done, quite simply, is tell a story. It told it well. Those who cared to read it were informed and entertained for 12 consecutive days. And, when the story reached its conclusion, readers who stuck with it knew much more about the Levy case than they had before, even if they had been rabid fans of the story in its pre-9/11 heyday. Complaints about the series fall into two major camps. The first camp gripes that focusing so much on the Levy case, so prominently (the series ran exclusively on the front page and got a lot of acreage at washingtonpost.com), was tabloid journalism, racist, and all manner of other sins. They say this because, fundamentally, they weren't interested enough in the series to consider it important and they whine about how many stories the paper could have covered instead. You know what? It's a free country. Read or watch something else while the rest of us get informed and enjoy a good story.The second camp gripes that the series buried the lede. This one's a closer call. Post ombudsman Howell weighed in with this camp when she wrote:In the Q&A today, Leen wrote: "we wanted to try to tell the story as a serial narrative in real time, unfolding as it happened through the eyes of the investigators and the investigated." They succeeded. It read much like a book, or like the serial that it was -- a trick learned long ago by magazines and newspapers that were happy to feed the hunger for a good yarn. I appreciated the digestible size of each day's installment (two normal-length takes on the Web). And, even though the writing eschewed convention, it contained news. Yesterday's Reporters' Notebook entry helpfully summarized the key findings of the series, which is an impressive list. Is it buried, and published too late to do the inverted-pyramid crowd any good? No and no. The Post deserves praise for resisting the impulse to do the Important Series in the same old journalistic way. And for breaking news, in this unorthodox way, that really matters -- holding police and pack journalism accountable for making fatal mistakes in 2001-02. The media-frenzy chapter has useful insights into former Rep. Gary Condit's PR strategy. But, for my money, the most damning details about journalistic sins came in the preceding chapter, where we see how competitive reporters gobbled up police leaks without the necessary skepticism (will we ever learn?). And, for those who want a shorthand summary, Leen provided it in this exchange with a reader today:My advice: Invest time in the longer version. It's a good and important read.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).