Opinions

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida dominated our incoming e-mail and phone calls. The national media had just started reporting on the story, so we expected that we’d receive large volumes of reader feedback.

Then things got quiet. Until last weekend, that is, when The Post ran a piece about newly released evidence in the case. But it wasn’t the story that bothered readers, it was the photograph, which was of a young-looking Trayvon Martin, taken years before he was killed at age 17.

Readers complained that this was unfair, especially when placed next to the mug shot of an older-looking George Zimmerman, and accused The Post of being biased toward Martin.

The ombudsman is being bombarded by input from readers, via e-mail and phone calls, about the story that Post reporter Jason Horowitz wrote on Mitt Romney’s teenage years at the prestigious Cranbrook School in Michigan.

The story leads with an anecdote about Romney and some of his friends in his dormitory tackling and pinning to the ground an unpopular classmate and forcibly cutting off his bleached-blond, longish hair. The boy, John Lauber, was frightened and in tears, Horowitz explained, and the boy turned out to be gay.

The rest of the deeply reported story provides extensive context to Romney’s years there, what the school was like, where Romney fit in the boys’ hierarchy, and the fact that a lot of people liked the son of Michigan’s then-governor, George Romney.

Conservative Web sites have criticized the piece on several grounds.

The first is that The Post changed the text of one paragraph from the online version published on Thursday to the print version published on Friday without telling readers. It’s a description of how one of Romney’s high school friends, Stu White, felt after hearing about the hair-cutting prank. White was not present at the prank.

Twice in recent months, the Post has made a major change with no public announcement or explanation to readers ahead of time.

In January, it was a 25-cent increase in the cover price, from 75 cents to $1, that just suddenly appeared one day. (Home subscribers got a price increase too, although it was noted in the mailed bills.)

Then last week, The Post switched its free “Today’s Paper” online feature — where you could see and read digitized versions of the daily printed newspaper pages — to a fee-based system. A third party, NewspaperDirect.com, which distributes many print versions of publications electronically, operates the “e-Replica” setup.

Actually, NewspaperDirect has done this for The Post for about six years, for a fee, and The Post says it didn’t make sense to have two versions, one free and one paid.

Here’s my list of some of the best Post stories that put an analytical eye on Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts; some were written during the 2007-08 presidential campaign, and some are from the past year during his second run for the presidency.

 I’ll do a similar list on The Post stories looking critically at Barack Obama in the next couple of weeks.

--For an excellent character study of Romney, how he thinks about politics, and how he sees himself, see Ann Gerhart’s profile in The Post’s weeklong series of stories in December about the GOP presidential candidates, “The Contenders.”

Aside from its status as the nation’s capital, Washington is the home to several professional sports teams. And when one of these teams does something noteworthy, editors here find themselves facing tough choices about when it’s the right time to put sports news (that also happens to be local) on Page A1, as opposed to the front of the Sports section.

Take, for example, the recent lead-up to the start Thursday of the NFL Draft. A photo of quarterback Robert Griffin III, this year’s Heisman Trophy winner, was splashed across Page One last Sunday, accompanying a lengthy profile of the player that many expected (correctly) would be the Redskins’ top draft pick. Some readers felt this was a better fit for the Sports front rather than for a newspaper’s most coveted real estate on A1.