Sifting and winnowing, cutting and running.

Paper’s Report on Killing Was Seen Only Online
By TIM ARANGO

It was a two-part story of homicide and intrigue, wrapped in salaciousness and sexual innuendo, nearly 7,000 words long — the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age.

But the article of the unsolved 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, was written for The Washington Post’s Web readers only, published on May 31 and June 1.

The decision to keep the article out of the print edition angered many readers who still pay for the newspaper. It also highlighted the thorny issues newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences.
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In one letter that The Post published after its article ran online, a reader wrote: “Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet. 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.”

The project, it seems, was not an experiment in Web-only journalism at one of the nation’s largest newspapers, but a result of the financial pressure afflicting the industry.

Editors at The Post have said 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.
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Meanwhile, how the story was covered in the nearly three years between the crime and Mr. Duggan’s series speaks to the condition of the news industry.

Craig Brownstein, an executive at the big public relations firm Edelman, and three friends who all lived near the crime scene became amateur reporters and started a blog last year called whomurderedrobertwone.com. Along with The Legal Times newspaper, the blog chronicled the case and the incremental legal news that was largely ignored by the mainstream news media.

Mr. Brownstein began the blog late last year, shortly after three people, who lived in the townhouse where Mr. Wone had been killed, were charged with obstruction of justice. No one has been charged in the killing.

“There was something about the proximity of this case to where we lived, and that it had languished for two years,” Mr. Brownstein said. “Seven months after we started digging, it’s still clear as mud.”