Sweeping negative statements are a minefield for journalists. Say you're interviewing a guy for a profile, and you ask him if he's ever gotten into any trouble. "Never been arrested," he replies. Before including such a claim in a story, you've got to hit the databases covering the entire country. And then you'll have to [...]

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.

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 [...]