His feelings about Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli aren't nearly as charitable. "Marcus should quit while he's ahead," says Mendelsohn.

What accounts for this rankling? Comments by Brauchli in Howard Kurtz's news-breaking story of Tuesday morning. In explaining why the paper didn't run Mendelsohn's piece on Lindsay Ess, Brauchli said this: "While the piece was beautifully photographed and nicely constructed, it was also similar to other pieces we had run in the magazine recently," Brauchli told Kurtz.

Just what pieces were those? Brauchli cited one such "similar" story in a Monday evening interview with me: A piece by Caitlin Gibson on a 13-year-old girl with dwarfism who was struggling to extend her limbs. "I'm not into hammering readers with repetitive stories on similar themes," says Brauchli.

First things first: The No. 1 editor at the Post appears to be committing what the towering former Washington City Paper Senior Editor Tom Scocca calls a "false plural." The limb-extension piece appears to encompass the entirety of his showcase of "other stories." A more precise articulation would have been "another story."

Second things second: Mendelsohn argues that the story of the 13-year-old undergoing limb extension and his story aren't actually similar. "I haven’t seen any other stories about a quadruple amputee who’s teaching fashion at VCU," he says. Comparing the two, argues Mendelsohn, shows an insensitivity to the handicapped. "It's lumping disparate disabilities in the same group....That's like saying we did a story about an Asian last year" as a reason for turning down further stories on Asians.

Maybe. Certainly Brauchli could have been more general on the matter, saying that the consensus among editors was that mag fare focused too much on death, destruction, and misery. But Brauchli's grouping together the two limb-related stories seems like a fair journalistic judgment. Readers don't make the fine distinctions that Mendelsohn makes about how his piece may differ from the other one. Their thought process goes more like this: Oh, another story having to do with arms and legs and pain.

Even so, Brauchli has been a touch schizophrenic in his references to Mendelsohn, switching between two distinct personas: Wise Executive Editor and Unwise Executive Editor.

Wise Executive Editor: "While the piece was beautifully photographed and nicely constructed, it was also similar to other pieces we had run in the magazine recently," Brauchli told Kurtz.

Skinny: Good move to credit the freelancer with good work. He's the little guy.

Unwise Executive Editor: "We're not running 10,000- or 15,000-word articles anymore. It's not because we don't value subtle writing and long-form journalism. But great journalism is not defined by story length or extended, novel-worthy dialogue."

Skinny: Bad move to discredit the freelancer. He's the little guy. Let's break this down into a couple of subcomponents:

a) It's true that Mendelsohn handed in a draft of about 10,000 words. That's what writers do after they've spent a year immersing with a subject. But when a freelancer hands in 10,000 words, it's not an "article," as Brauchli suggests, but rather a "draft." And drafts get broken down by editors, cut to pieces, shrunk, tightened, whatever. There are tens of editors at the Post who could have taken Mendelsohn's draft and distilled it into something far more digestible. For Brauchli to say length is an issue here is a pure cop-out.

b) Why is Brauchli slamming "extended, novel-worthy dialogue"? For one, he sounds like a traditional newsman hammering a precious, self-indulgent writer. Not too generous.

For another, why slam extended, novel-worthy dialogue? Seems to me I encounter some of that from time to time in the Washington Post. Just a few weeks ago, for instance, Post reporter J. Freedom DuLac did a fine story about D.C. lawyer Patrick Hand struggling to organize a tour for '60s band Love.

Here's an excerpt:

Steve Baenen, wearing a Deep Purple concert T-shirt, approaches the table where Hand has set up shirts, CDs and posters. His long hair pulled back in a ponytail, Baenen has made the two-hour drive from Green Bay, because "it's hard to find a trippy show anymore." He buys $30 worth of CDs. Hand gives him a concert poster that still lists the three original acts.

"What happened to the Prunes?" Baenen asks.

Hand: "Not enough advance sales. Not enough money to pay for everything."

Baenen: "That's a bummer, man."

Hand: "It is a bummer."

Now that's novel-worthy!

Yesterday, I interviewed Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli for a story I was writing on the Washington Post Magazine. I was working on allegations that Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth may have played a part in killing a magazine story written by a freelancer who happened to be a friend of hers.

And as I found out in this morning's edition of the Washington Post, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz was working on those same allegations. Kurtz's story detailed how Matthew Mendelsohn had worked for months on a long narrative about Lindsay Ess, a woman who had had all four limbs amputated. When Mendelsohn mentioned the piece to Weymouth at a social event, she just about gagged, exclaiming that this was just another in a too-long lineage of depressing Washington Post Magazine stories. Of course, the publisher hadn't yet read the piece, but from the sound of it, BLECH! Depressing!

As Kurtz laid out in his thoroughly reported, perfectly timed piece that blew all my efforts out of the water, Weymouth didn't keep her thoughts to herself. Rather, she mentioned it to top editors, and the piece ended up on the spike.

And thus the question posed so timelily by the Kurtz piece: Did the publisher of the Post kill a story?

When I put this question to Brauchli, I got a definitive answer. The publisher, he said, played no role in killing the piece, which died via a "normal editorial decision." "Whatever Katharine may have felt about the piece was immaterial to the editorial process," said Brauchli in his chat with me.

That was a strong statement, I told Brauchli, but I told him I still needed to speak with the editor of the piece to verify the normality of this decision. I mentioned that I'd tried to reach the editor---Sydney Trent---but hadn't gotten a call back. Trent has since declared that she'll have no comment.

The top guy couldn't have been less sympathetic to my sourcing problem. "I don’t think it’s necessary for us to lay out all of the processes in the newspaper to make decisions," he snapped. "Newspapers spend way too much time explaining themselves." He went on: "Too many people call our newsroom. There are endless queries on our journalism these days. I think it’s better for us to focus on producing journalism than on our process."

When I opened the paper next morning to see the timely Kurtz piece (have I linked to that thing yet?), I discovered that the magazine editor had indeed explained her decision to kill the Mendelsohn piece. Here's the quote, which comes from a well-reported, timely piece that indirectly prompted a bout of screaming and swearing at a certain D.C. residence this morning: "Sydney Trent, the magazine's acting editor at the time, said she declined to run the story 'because it was clear the newspaper wanted to move in a different direction. That handwriting was very clearly on the wall.'"

Hmmm---is that what you'd call a "normal editorial decision"? On the face of things, it sounds like an editor frustrated with management, not business as usual.

So I put the question today to Brauchli---just how "normal" was this decision? His response:

I'd made clear to the magazine's editors that we were shifting direction, away from overlong, occasionally overwrought articles and towards livelier, more engaging journalism. Story lengths in the magazine were often too long, subjects were sometimes remote, and tenor wasn't always consistent with what other editors and I believe our readers want in a Sunday magazine. When Mr. Mendelsohn's piece landed, we were in the early stages of making the changes that the magazine editors knew were coming, and they acted in a perfectly sensible way to begin implementing those changes.

I should add that I have read Mr. Mendelsohn's piece, and it is a fine article, illustrated with some beautiful photography. Our decision not to publish it was not predicated on the quality of his work, but on the changes we were making to the magazine.

We interrupt this overlong blog item to consider that last sentence. So the magazine made a decision about a story that wasn't based on the quality of the story? Now there's an editorial principle for ya.

Actually, Brauchli's statement about the story quality not affecting the decision may be dead on. Mendelsohn says that he got the bad news about the piece from a junior editor at the magazine. Quite naturally, Mendelsohn wanted to know what the mag's boss---Trent---had to say about the piece. "I asked my editor what she---meaning, the acting editor of the magazine---thought of it, and there was a moment of silence and she said, 'She didn’t read it.'" (Update: Trent just e-mailed to say that she did indeed read the story.)

Normal editorial decision?

Executive editor's protestations notwithstanding, a publisher's opinion about a pending story is a terribly hard thing to bottle up, especially in a newsroom filled with Twittering, texting, e-mailing, mouth-talking gossips. "I probably should have kept my mouth shut," says Weymouth. "I fully expected them to publish it." As evidence that she didn't imagine she'd influence the editorial process, Weymouth noted that she'd been pushing for "four and a half years" for a wedding column---a feature that appeared only recently in the pages of the Post.

Update: Check out the piece by Slate's Jack Shafer on why the boss needs to be careful about critical ketchup-and-mustard decisions.

Stay tuned for City Desk's Next Piece on the Washington Post Magazine: What Do L&B Mean to You?

So the Washington Post appeared to want to make you pay big bucks for meet-ups with their reporters and editors. Politico had the scoop on the Post scheme in which Publisher Katharine Weymouth would host "salons" in which lobbyists and association muckety mucks would pay large sums of money to hobnob with Posties, Obama administration officials, and members of Congress.

Let's stop and just say it: This is/was really, really dumb. Unethical and dumb. Yesterday, Weymouth published a "Dear Reader" letter apologizing for the now-abandoned salons. It reads in part:

"A flier distributed last week suggested that we were selling access to power brokers in Washington through dinners that were to take place at my home. The flier was not approved by me or newsroom editors, and it did not accurately reflect what we had in mind. But let me be clear: The flier was not the only problem."

I wonder if the Weymouth has to put a stop order on the hot appetizers she planned on serving to D.C.'s elite. I hope the Post doesn't have to eat the cost of the flower arrangement orders. And I hope they got a deal on those fliers they're not going to use. Next time: Evites.

There had been a lot of dithering on the part of the Post's staff on the subject of these salons. Howard Kurtz, the paper's media reporter, suggested the events were like the New Yorker Festival. [Um, no the salons would not have been like the New Yorker Festival]. It is really doubtful that the salons would have been open to the public and given big-time ad treatment within its pages. The salons appeared to be private affairs between Washington elite.

The best takedown/summation of this scandal? You can find it at The Awl. The Shadow Editors---featuring WCP alum Tom Scocca---dissect the scandal and the Weymouth letter. It's actually funny.

I am still confused about the extent of the Post's editors and reporters involvement in setting up the salons.

*photo courtesy Business Week.

Now come a flurry of memos in the wake of the crisis. Here are a couple of them:

From Publisher Katharine Weymouth:

All:

You will have seen this morning a story in Politico and now widely picked up that we were planning a series of salon dinners. A flyer went out that was prepared by the Marketing Department and was never vetted by me or by the newsroom. Had it been, the flyer would have been immediately killed, because it completely misrepresented what we were trying to do.

I do not normally respond to stories but this one has created enough of a stir that I wanted to take the time to reaffirm our commitment, first and foremost, to our journalism and our integrity. There is nothing more important and no amount of money that would cause us to jeopardize that. We are always looking for new revenue streams but we will pursue only avenues that uphold our high standards of journalism.

We were planning to do a series of dinners and had requested newsroom participation but with parameters such that we did not in any way compromise our integrity. Sponsorship of events, like advertising in the newspaper, must be at arm's length and cannot imply control over the content or access to our journalists. At this juncture, we will not be holding the planned July dinner and we will not hold salon dinners involving the newsroom.

We do believe that there is a viable way to expand our expertise into live conferences and events that simply enhances what we do - cover Washington for Washingtonians and those interested in Washington. And we will begin to do live events in ways that enhance our reputation and in no way call into question our integrity.

From Charles Pelton:

As many of you know, a flyer was distributed this week offering an “underwriting opportunity” for a salon dinner on health-care reform, in which the news department had been asked to participate.

The language in that flyer, which was not vetted with the newsroom, precludes the participation of the newsroom. We're canceling the Salon. The Washington Post newsroom will not participate in events where promises are made or implied that in exchange for money The Post will offer access to key sources, newsroom personnel or will refrain from confrontational questioning. Our newsroom's independence from advertisers and sponsors is inviolable.

There is a long tradition of news organizations hosting conferences and events, and we believe The Post, including the newsroom, can participate in conferences and events in ways that are consistent with our values.
Charles Pelton
General Manager
Washington Post Conferences & Events

No, this region's premier daily isn't signing anyone to a multimillion-dollar contract or deploying the cover-two on Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. But the paper may soon be designating a platoon of "franchise players."

Here's why: The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild and Washington Post Co. management have just completed negotiations on a new collective bargaining contract. Consistent with its stance toward other unions at the Post Co., management pushed to undermine seniority protections in the event of layoffs. In a yet-to-be-ratified contract with the paper's newsroom union, Post managers would be able to choose a group of stars---25 percent of unionized employees---who would be exempt from the last-hired, first-fired rules that have governed the paper for years.

Here's how the provision would work: Say the Post decided it needed to trim 10 reporters from its Metro staff. In the seniority-protecting Washington Post, the laying-off would have started with the recent hires---often the young, workaholic types that managers really want to retain. Now, under the unapproved contract, Metro's top managers would be able to set aside 25 percent of the guild-covered staff and say to them, in effect: Even though you were just hired, you're protected from the layoffs.

To carry the scenario one step further, consider that the number of guild-covered employees in Metro is about 130. That means that more than 30 could be designated as franchise players, and the layoffs would begin with the rest of the staff, in last-hired, first-fired succession. "The vast majority are still covered by seniority system," says Joe Kahraman, a local guild rep. Kahraman was pleased with the terms of the tentative compromise in light of what the Post Co.'s negotiators have done to the seniority protections of other unions represented at the company. Destroyed them, that is.

The Post's guild bargaining committee is recommending that the rank-and-file approve the proposed contract, on the rationale that it doesn't totally screw over the workers. It provides for lump-sum payments---bonuses, basically---for staffers of $1,000 this year and $600 next year, though there will be no standard raises to base pay. "[G]iven the climate of wage and benefit cuts elsewhere in the industry and the fact that The Post’s newspaper division showed an operating loss of more than $50 million in the first quarter, we believe this is the very best we could achieve," reads a guild posting on the matter.

Another high point: The tentative contract, according to Kahraman, provides a process under which employees of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the company's online publishing subsidiary, could become members of the guild. Washingtonpost.com has long been produced in WPNI's Arlington offices by a non-unionized work force; that operation is due to merge with the Post's newsroom in the fall.

Yet the big news from these negotiations relates to seniority. The 25 percent cut-out for the favored pupils of the newsroom's bosses strikes a huge blow to the longstanding seniority system. According to the guild, there are roughly 960 employees covered by the contract, a little more than half of whom work in the newsroom. If there's a fresh-faced staffer with great potential, there's no way editors will have trouble protecting her. And a longer-serving reporter will be out of a job.

The negotiations steer the Post toward a much less humane approach to cutting personnel costs. Four times this decade, the paper has tapped into its bottomless pension fund to induce senior newsies out the door. What a painless experience---veteran reporters and editors leave with a mouthful of cake and wheelbarrow full of money.

Layoffs under this 25-75 plan could get nasty. First, editors would have to tussle over the franchise-player roster, a process that would mire the newsroom in gossip. Then they'd have to show their work. "They would have to give us a list of that," says Kahraman. "It would be transparent." In the event of a layoff, staffers at the various sections would be able to look at a chart detailing just how far down they stand on the layoff depth chart.

On the plus side, such documentation would sure take the guesswork out of Washingtonian writer Harry Jaffe's occasional efforts to list the paper's up-and-comers.

The scheme, however, could reward ruthlessness. There'd be nothing stopping Post editors from using salary alone to determine who'd be on the list of layoff-exempt personnel. They could just pad the list will all the lowest earners in the newsroom. That way, the layoffs would kick in for only the top earners, maximizing the savings from layoffs and minimizing morale.

Guild activists are hoping to secure contract ratification by Thursday afternoon---as is management. "We believe the agreement strikes a fair and responsible balance in this difficult climate for both newspapers and the overall economy, and we hope that it will be ratified and signed this week," says Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth.

Weymouth didn't indicate whether layoffs are imminent.

That's where Roger Black comes in. The paper has contracted with this renowned New York design guru to redo its newspaper and Web site. In recent weeks, Black has been meeting with staffers to get their ideas on freshening the look of the Post brand.

Like all deliberative processes at the Post, this one won't spawn a revolution. "Instead of a redesign, it'll be much more of a cleaning up of visually contrasting elements," says a Post source, referring to "typefaces changing from section to section," among other minor design problems.

In a Wednesday meeting with a group of newsroom leaders, Black pushed his audience to think expansively about what the paper needs and what it can eliminate. One attendee says Black will be focusing on how to fit the Post's journalism in an ever-shrinking news hole, as well as coming up with "strategies for helping stories pop off the page more."

Black certainly can't complain that he isn't getting enough help. To generate recommendations on the redesign, the Post has assembled 14 committees, each with reps from both the print and online sides of the operation. The best committee name is "The Crown Jewels," a panel that is presumably working on preserving and enhancing the greatest assets of the product. Other panel jurisdictions include the Sunday paper, agate and listings, and breaking news.

There's no telling where all the committees and the contract design talent will push the paper's Web site, which recently bumped its "washingtonpost.com" banner in favor of the iconic, bold-letter "The Washington Post." Top Post officials have declined comment on where the site's design is headed. The best we could get was this statement from a Washington Post spokesperson: "Roger Black is providing design consulting services to The Washington Post and our redesign effort will look at both the newspaper and the Web site."

In May 2008, Black completed an overhaul of the Washington Times site, an operation that resulted in a largely black homepage with a rotating box, or "cube," showcasing the moment's top news stories. The content "innovations" of the site may have been a bit ahead of their time, including "400,000 horizontal entry points, or 'news themes,'" integrated into the site, as well as this feature: "Communities built around topics and hosted by 'mayors' who moderate the debate each day, with related sub-communities called neighborhoods into the web site."

Black is a celebrated talent who has engineered the look of many "content-based media" sites, including MSNBC.com, Discovery.com, and @Home. On his site, Black conveys the thinking behind his work: "Media design is not just window-dressing. A redesign is not a 'face lift.' Design is the structural link between the customers and the product."

One observer has a less philosophical view of how Black appeals to his clients: "He designs newspaper sites that look like newspapers."

Black is the second high-flying, New York-based designer to take a whack at the Post site in as many years. In late 2007, executives at washingtonpost.com commissioned the Wonderfactory, a design shop that counts the Huffington Post, WebMD, and the Food Network among its clients, to make sense of the mishmash of links and images that clutter the homepage. Jim Brady, then executive editor of washingtonpost.com, expressed hope that the Wonderfactory look would hit the site by the November 2008 elections.

That never happened. Though the site has incorporated Wonderfactory's vision for a rejiggered Going Out Guide, most other parts of the firm's project have been abandoned. In the process, a whole lot of mock-ups were kicked to the curb. According to Wonderfactory Creative Director Joe McCambley, the Post paid for a user needs analysis, a user interface design, a "mood board exercise"---designed to help ferret out the company's design aesthetic---as well as redesign work on the homepage, article pages, and various section headers. The work cost the Post upwards of $200,000, according to an informed source. "They were an amazing client," says McCambley.

When asked about bagging the mock-ups, a Post spokesperson replied: "Some work done by Wonderfactory has already been used on our site—Going Out Guide, for example—and we will be using more. It was never an all or nothing approach."

Wonderfactory's work product reportedly didn't wow the Post's new guard, including Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. When pressed on this matter, however, Brauchli went generic, writing in an e-mail that the paper was in the "planning phase, so nothing to add."

This whole planning phase isn't working out too well for the people at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), the Arlington-based Post Co. subsidiary that has run the Post's Web site for more than a decade. Founded as an entity independent of the mother ship, WPNI was supposed to incubate Web publishing innovations away from the retrograde tugs of the newsroom's old guard. Over the years, the two sides have fought over everything from food to politics to personnel.

The accession of Weymouth as Post publisher in February 2008 marked the beginning of the end of the Post's separate-but-pretty-much-equal divide between paper and Web offices. Cross-river rivalries and personnel duplication, goes the Weymouth-era thinking, are no longer sustainable, and so the operations must merge.

Though the dot-com workers in Arlington have yet to move en masse to the main Post building at 15th and L Streets NW, one of the most painful aspects of the merger has already gone down. That would be the elimination of managerial redundancy. In a combined online-print newsroom, you can't have two publishers, two executive editors, and so on. In the end, there can be only one---that's an eerie theme of the 1986 fantasy-action flick Highlander that just so happens to apply to the modern-day Washington Post.

Getting down to one has repeatedly entailed the departure of top brass at WPNI. Publisher Caroline Little left last year, as did politics editor Russ Walker. Executive Editor Brady left his post at the end of January, followed by Tom Kennedy, washingtonpost.com's top multimedia manager. The only top WPNI personality to make it into the new management at the Post is former Web site Editor Liz Spayd, a longtime Postie who has deeper ties to the main newsroom than to the Web. Spayd is now one of Brauchli's co-managing editors; the other is Raju Narisetti, who lords over the Web operation, among other things.

The departures have left rank-and-file WPNIers feeling a touch exposed as the office merger looms. Little, Brady, et al. went to the mat repeatedly over the years to stick up for the Web site's autonomy and managed to push the newsroom on all kinds of Web innovations, including the embrace of blogging and comments from the public on articles. There's no telling whether the new structure will endow the company's Webby types with the sort of power necessary to strong-arm the newsroom as the Internet continues to develop.

According to sources, Brady decided to leave the company after learning that he wouldn't be appointed as a managing editor and that Web producers in the combined newsroom would likely be reporting to the paper's section editors, and not to a Web authority. Such org-chart dynamics matter greatly to the Post's digital future. If Web producers end up answering to section editors at the paper, they'll inevitably end up doing more work for the dead-tree product and less for washingtonpost.com. Increasingly strapped for resources, Post editors will find nice ways of hijacking this labor pool: Hey, Ms. Web Producer, we hear you have some excellent copy-editing skills!

Top Posties won't come close to discussing the lines of authority in the merged newsroom: "We know and value the tremendous creative talent in The Post's digital newsroom. Our plans recognize that strength and will enhance it," writes Brauchli via e-mail.

If so, Brauchli should brush up on his memo-writing skills. Dot-com personnel were scandalized to read his electronic missive on the change to a bold-letter banner on the Web site. It read, in part: "This recognizes what we all have long known: washingtonpost.com is very much part of The Washington Post, complementary and in some ways distinct, but an absolutely central part of who we are." The "complementary and in some ways distinct" part didn't go down too well in Arlington.

The patronizing tone of Brauchli's words conveys the current reality of the Washington Post---that the newsroom is swallowing the Web site, for better or worse. Says Brady: "They've wanted to control it forever and now they have their chance--and I hope it works out for the best. I think they'll find it's not as easy as it looks from the outside."

Says Brady on the question of whether his position will live: "I don't know the answer to that." As to why he's leaving, well, the merger is unquestionably a big part of it. Brady has been executive editor of washingtonpost.com for four years--a full Olympic cycle that Brady has spent on nearly equal footing with the big boss of the main newsroom. For most of Brady's tenure, that's been Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. Last year at this time, in fact, Brady was lording it all over the print guys, in a fight relating to the Post's coverage of national politics.

The newsroom had hired away washingtonpost.com's congressional blogger, Paul Kane, and was hoping that it could transfer Kane's slot to the newsroom as well--meaning that the print operation would essentially be taking a slot from dot-com. Brady said no dice--we'll be hiring our own congressional blogger.

In addition to turf battles of that sort, Brady has had the authority to ram important changes down the know-it-all throats of newsroom people. For instance, reporters at the Post once objected to allowing the posting of comments and to other initiatives now considered de rigueur for a newspaper's Web site.

"The battles that at times played out between the newspaper and the web site--how they play out is going to change," says Brady.

Indeed, and in a way that probably wouldn't have pleased Brady. Publisher Katharine Weymouth made it very clear when she hired Marcus Brauchli last summer: This fellow will control both the print and online operations.

"The job was going to change," says Brady, who had no great interest in moving into D.C. "I want to be on the digital side."

The dot-com chief also says he's needs a serious rebooting. "I have a track record," he says, of staying about four or five years at a job and then burning out. "I'm beat up, tired, burned out."

OK, but did Weymouth or anyone else hint that it was time for Brady to go? No way, he says: "My call."

Fishbowl DC starts its "Hottest Media Types" contest tomorrow. I say call in the dogs and put out the fire, we have ourselves a winner already. Hubba hubba!

(I'm on deadline and don't have time to read the story. I'm sure Wemple will get to it presently.)