The author of a new Washington Post Style section column on entertaining as well as a book on the same subject has lofty goals for her get-togethers: "I want everyone who leaves my house to leave feeling better about themselves," said Quinn in an interview with City Desk.

Judged against her own standards, Quinn may have stumbled last Friday night.

The event was a holiday bash for Style staffers, and the venue was not Quinn's house but the Georgetown residence of Style co-boss Ned Martel. In any event, Quinn, the queen of the party, felt compelled to play the headlining role, delivering the keynote toast. According to attendees and Quinn herself, the toast hit on the following themes:

I've been with Style for 30 years, and Style is back! Back to where it was in the good old days. I talk to people these days who read Style every day and it's been a long time since I've heard that. There's energy and creativity and vibrancy now. Ned and [co-boss] Lynn [Medford] are doing great work. Blah, blah.

When asked how people should have responded to the message, Quinn responded: "I think they should have been ecstatic."

Ecstasy, though, was scarce among this crowd. "Everybody thought [the toast] was inconsiderate of all the people who’ve been there for some time, that it was a failing operation that people didn't read," says a source.

Another interpretation from another attendee: Quinn was singing the praises of the section decades ago, back when she was a star social correspondent—i.e., the "good old days"—and now, when she is again a regular contributor, via her weekly column "The Party." "This was clearly Sally talking about Sally," says the attendee.

No narcissism here, protests Quinn. "I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about the energy and excitement that we had, and I see that now and it’s just thrilling."

A couple of partygoers claim that Martel was wincing when Quinn was gushing over the turnaround in Style quality, a charge that Martel denies. "I have never winced at anything that Sally Quinn has said." As to the elegance of Quinn's toast, Martel took a pass: "I think it’s best for that night to exist without the host’s next-day or next-week commentary."

Whatever the feelings about Quinn's attempt at holiday cheer, the gossip that lingers days later attests to a number of issues:

Issue No. 1: Quinn is right that Style is improving, as City Desk has pointed out previously.

Issue No. 2: The quality and avant-garditude of the Style section is one of the great agonies of the Washington Post. Oh, it was so awesome decades ago, goes a popular refrain. Everyone loves to wax nostalgic about its classic writers. Hendrickson! Allen! Quinn! The debate about when the section was great and when it sucked is the journalistic equivalent of "Man, it's cold outside"—a waste of breath that'll never accomplish anything. When the section turned 40 early this year, Style writer Hank Stuever tilted at the craziness:

There's a kind of longtime Washington Post reader who is only too smug about informing us how great Style was in the 1970s, or the '80s or the '90s (the early '90s, they sniff, like oenophiles distinguishing vintage). We are certain that by the end of Style's first week, someone complained that it was better on Monday and Tuesday. At a Style staff meeting a few years back, art critic Paul Richard, who's been here since the Earth cooled, said that anyone who tells you Style was so much better back-when should be condemned to crank the microfilm and forced to read it, day in and day out.

Issue No. 3: Quinn couldn't abide a certain top editor at the Post. When asked to expand on her claim that Style is back, Quinn obliged: "I would say that Ben [Bradlee, former Post executive editor and husband of Quinn] invented Style and he really cared about it. It was priority No. 1. When he stepped down as editor, it was not the No. 1 priority anymore. And when Marcus took over, it was a big priority for him."

Let's see—think there might just be a subtle little elbow in there between the lines? What do you know—that non-priority period just so happens to coincide with the editorship of Leonard Downie Jr., who ran the Post newsroom from 1991 to 2008.

But this is one pissing match for which Downie won't whip it out. When informed of Quinn's analysis, he declined to comment.

Issue No. 4: Quinn is a lovely person to talk to, a true believer in fine entertaining, perky-yet-tough, a great family woman, a co-moderator of an innovative Post Web page on religion, and surely many other good things, but her "The Party" column isn't one of the things contributing to the Style section's resurgence. Thus far, it's a jumble of reflections and peeves from a woman for whom entertaining is a touch too important. And if you actually read it, there's no way to avoid the self-aggrandizing land mines that can hit you at any point. My fave thus far: "One of the nicest compliments I ever got was at a large New Year's Eve party I had. A man came over to me and said, 'I love this party. Everyone here looks so beautiful.' (Candles, rose-colored walls and pink light bulbs never hurt.)"

Hit play and find out!

Let's mark the start of hostilities as mid-week. That's when, according to an informed source, Allen raised questions about a Roig-Franzia story about a woman who had undergone multiple abortions. In the back and forth, Roig-Franzia allegedly called Allen a "dick." No punches were thrown.

Peace prevailed until Friday morning, when Style staffers convened to discuss their journalism. According to sources, Roig-Franzia at one point in the meeting reached across the table and grabbed Allen's notepad, tearing a page from it. Allen barked, "Give me my fucking notebook." Roig-Franzia complied, pushing it back across the table.

After that incident, not much went according to the Post Stylebook. Allen, an assignment editor for Style, learned that one of his reporters, Monica Hesse, had been tasked by Style co-boss Ned Martel to do a funny-type story coming off the big news on the congressional ethics investigation. Allen wasn't apprised that Hesse had been so assigned and let Martel have it. "Next time you want to assign a story to one of my writers, you come talk to me. I'm right here," Allen said to Martel, according to a Post source. They discussed the matter and came to an amiable conclusion.

The story then moves from errors of protocol to errors of journalism. Allen eventually got his hands on the copy that Hesse and Roig-Franzia had been dispatched to generate. It was a "charticle" on famous incidents in which key actors in history have unwittingly coughed up sensitive information to the wrong people.

One of the headlining incidents in the charticle was how a Confederate solider had lost some military plans of Robert E. Lee in a field that later found their way into Union hands. The original story reportedly said that the offense occurred in Virginia. Wrong–Maryland.

There were other errors as well.

Allen made clear his displeasure with the integrity of the piece, proclaiming that it was the "second-worst piece I've ever had handed to me in 43 years," according to a source. The first-worst was a mistake-ridden profile of Paul Robeson that never saw the printed page. Those 43 years include Allen's 39 years of service at the Post along with a tenure at the New Haven Register.

The veteran editor gave pretty much the same sharp-elbowed spiel to both Hesse and Roig-Franzia. Hesse responded by asking for the story back so that she could iron out some of the wrinkles.

Roig-Franzia responded by saying, “Henry, don’t be such a cocksucker.”

At that, Allen leapt into action, shoving Roig-Franzia. He then popped him in the cheek. According to an eyewitness account, Roig-Franzia didn't try to match the 5-11, 200-pound Allen punch for punch, instead opting for more of a civil-rights-movementy kind of stance.

Into the one-sided faceoff jumped Chris Richards, the Post's pop-music critic. One of the first responders, Richards stood between the hostile parties. Brauchli reportedly intervened as well.

After the set-to, Allen spent some time behind closed doors with managers. Brauchli told him that the Post just can't have this sort of conduct in the newsroom. Allen agreed. They left it at that.

Then it was on to the office of Style co-boss Lynn Medford, who was apparently briefed by Brauchli on what to say to Allen. Medford told Allen that Brauchli had said that this was a new era at the Post and we can't have violence in the newsroom. (What, did the smelling-salts lady take a buyout?) Another message from Brauchli to Allen via Medford: You can't come into the newsroom again for your entire career.

That sanction is not as harsh as it sounds: Allen's last day was to be Nov. 20. He is 68, had already accepted a buyout, was working on contract at the time of his lunge, and had already announced his retirement.

Of his swing, Allen says, "The last time I threw a punch at anybody was in the spring of 1963 in Parris Island, S.C., in Marine Corps recruit training." Allen served in Vietnam for four months. Roig-Franzia hung up when called on this matter.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out City Paper's exclusive reenactment of this historic event: Allen v. Roig-Franzia ~ The Movie!

Washington Post reporter Paul Duggan spent four months reporting and writing a two-part series on a juicy local murder case. The results were published on Monday and Tuesday, to great public acclaim. Yet faithful subscribers who scoop up their paper on the front steps each day found none of it in their pages—only a few teasers sending them to washingtonpost.com.

Is this a bold experiment by a savvy media institution to herd its readership across platforms? Depends on whom you ask.

When Duggan started out gathering facts on the Aug. 2, 2006, killing of 32-year-old lawyer Robert Wone, he got some welcome instructions from his editor. "I told him not to worry about length," recalls the editor, Lynn Medford.

Equipped with his mandate to go long, Duggan threw everything he had into the project. The fundamentals of the story demanded a generous treatment by the local daily: On the night of his killing, Wone, who lived in Fairfax with his wife, was staying in the D.C. home of three friends. He arrived at the house at about 10:30 p.m. Not long thereafter, he would end up murdered, with three stab wounds and a bunch of needle marks all over his body. Semen was found around his genitals and in his rectum.

The three housemates–Victor Zaborsky, Joseph Price, and Dylan Ward—claim the killing was the work of an intruder. Police allege "a weirdly elaborate sexual assault involving the injection of an incapacitating drug," in Duggan's words. Plenty of material, in other words, to keep a reporter occupied for a while.

The two-parter kicked off with a frenzied 911 call from Zaborsky, who told the dispatcher, among other things, "Oh, dear. . . . I can't believe this. . . . I can't believe this."

The full 911 call was a scoop. And if original reporting also counts as scoopage, so did many other details in the Duggan account, including an in-depth look at the bios and "polyamorous" lifestyle of the three housemates. "Who were these guys?" asks Duggan in an interview, pointing out that in previous media portrayals, they were merely "stick figures." Another high point of the series is that Duggan explains why the cops maintain that Wone was injected with an incapacitating drug even though toxicology tests have come up negative.

One more plug for the project: It was presented in a compelling and seamless thread—great, great late-spring-early-summer reading.

Craig Brownstein, one of the editors behind whomurderedrobertwone.com, credits Duggan for adding fresh material, and then some: "I think the real value of Duggan's series was putting most of the pieces into one coherent and compelling narrative....We're just glad he tackled the project and did it in a thoughtful and thoroughly informative way. He's a crackerjack reporter and writer."

Yet the series wasn't compelling enough, somehow, for the Post's top editors. When Medford, a top Metro editor, shopped the completed product to the brass, she was told that it'd have to be hacked way down to make it into the paper. It was a "newsprint issue," Medford recalls being told.

The next stop for the Wone manuscript was the Washington Post Magazine, a logical resting place for such a narrative. But Duggan-Medford got the Heisman there as well. Sydney Trent, an editor at the magazine, writes via e-mail that the story didn't quite clear the publication's bar: "We weren't let in on the Wone story until it was finished and while it was the sort of finely-executed piece you'd expect from Duggan, it wasn't written as a Magazine cover but as a story for the front page. The differences in that regard are considerable, and it was too late in the game to go back and try to retrofit."

Let's halt this blog post right here to contemplate the load of garbage in front of us. First off, who cares if you weren't "let in on" the story till it was finished? That's territorial nonsense. Second off, a narrative is a narrative is a narrative, and this whole mag. v. front page distinction is precious and illusory. How many magazine readers do you really think would have clogged the Free For All page with complaints that the Wone story read too much like a piece from the front section? Third off: "late in the game." What game? The obstruction-of-justice trial for the housemates isn't till May 2010. This thing could have held all summer—who else was going to spend four months reporting the Wone case—Express? Fourth off, retrofitting is what editors are paid to do. Trent showcases the sort of overthinking that leads to disastrous editorial decisions: Here's a story that has new facts and a tight narrative about a murder case that involves polyamorous men and an electro-ejaculation device. End of analysis!

With no foothold in the magazine, the piece wound up as a Web exclusive. Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli suggests the placement was something of a strategic coup:

We wanted to try something new, offering readers a multimedia approach to a fascinating crime narrative about which we'd already written extensively in the paper. And it worked. Readers came, read, looked, interacted and commented in droves. As for space, we have plenty of space in print and in the magazine. The Post will publish stories, in print or online, at any length they justify. If you're suggesting that we're so constrained in print that we're putting stories online, that would be wrong.

Hey Brauchli: See testimony from Medford, above. Also: The Post hadn't already "written extensively" on the case. Its coverage was pretty much limited to "day stories"—breaking news pieces—as the case has progressed over the years. Also also: There was nothing terribly new about this model—the paper did just about the same thing with Bob Kaiser's monster series on Gerald S.J. Cassidy.

Why all the fuss here about Web-only publication? Brauchli's indeed correct that readers have logged on "in droves" to check out the story. So what's the harm in keeping it out of the paper?

Well, it's that subscribers don't get the best that the Post has to offer on their front steps. Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander has written that he's received complaints from readers about the online-only presentation. I'll speak up for this group. We, the subscribers, don't want to click through five pages of Web presentation just to goose pageviews and soak in a story that we'd rather read in print—that's why we, like, subscribe!

It would take a lot of transgressions for me to cancel my subscription to the Post, but this whole Wone thing is a step in that direction.

Keeping the story out of the paper also expresses a certain amount of news arrogance on part of Post leaders. It's as if they think that all the stuff that occupies the 16-or-so pages in the front section is just so precious that it cannot possibly be preempted for something, well, far more interesting and readable.

Take a look at the front section of Monday's Post, the day that the Duggan series debuted online. There's a lot of Washington Post gruel in there, lots of places where room could have been made for Duggan. For starters, there's an AP story on Monday regarding some illegal-immigrant probe in Colorado on page A5. There's some fluff on Valerie Jarrett on A13. There's a big, tepid front-page story looking back on the tenure of former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. And A3 carries a heading "Education Policy & The Nation," featuring a story titled "46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards." Perhaps some of that stuff could have gone Web-only?

Next time, Brauchli & Co. would do well to heed the lessons of the Chandra series of July 2008. Here was a project with virtually the same formula as the Duggan series: Famous crime + well-constructed narrative + incremental advances in reporting=smashing success with subscribers. When you have something like that, you put it on all your platforms—print, Web, cellular, Kindle, flying saucer, whatever.