A Newsroom Brawl At The Washington Post? How 2009!
Is it just me or is the world going to hell in a handbasket? For the last few weeks, it's been all bad news. Murdered children, Homecoming gang rapes, a pandemic flu, brutal slayings of a nun and a priest, a rash of American troop deaths and now this.
According to the Washingtonian, Washington Post editor and Pulitzer-prize winning writer Henry Allen got all medieval on fellow writer Manuel Roig-Franzia over an apparent argument erupting from something called a "charticle."
That's a fun word to say, but what exactly is a charticle and why did it cause an otherwise well-respected 68-year old journalist to punch his co-worker in the face?
Wikipedia describes a charticle as: a combination of text, images and graphics that takes the place of a full article. OK, I get it. It's one of those graphic thingys nuevo-journalists use instead of writing full-length articles. I bet those pajama-wearing bloggers use these too. Do you see where this is going?
There's more to this story than the charticle of course. Witnesses to the skirmish stated Roig-Franzia overheard Allen dressing down fellow Style section writer Monica Hesse yelling, “This is total crap. It’s the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years," and reacted by telling Allen, "Oh, Henry, don’t be such a cocksucker.”
According to Gawker, this was the last straw for Allen, who'd already suffered the indignity of being called a "dick" by Manuel in a previous argument. That one erupted after Allen disparaged one of Manuel's stories. Later on, one more outburst occurred when Manuel supposedly "reached across the table and grabbed Allen's notepad, tearing a page from it." Who's calling who a dick here?
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