A 13-Part Series to Love or Hate

The serial format has been used by many newspapers -- most notably, "Black Hawk Down" in 1997 in the Philadelphia Inquirer -- but only once recently in The Post, with a mostly online series of 27 parts about a top Washington lobbyist.

Several readers thought the murders of African Americans in the District had been slighted for one white woman who wasn't even from Washington. And Robert E. Pierre, a Post Metro reporter, said that the emphasis on Levy "seems like either an awful big coincidence or just recognition that . . . a white life is worth more than a black one."

Pierre said it was "unconscionable that we would devote 12 parts and a year to the investigation of this one death. About 200 people are killed in this city every year, most of them black and male. But the one that captures the 'world,' according to us, is the death of a 24-year-old white woman who had a relationship with a congressman."

Patricia Turner of Silver Spring said she loves The Post: "I am appalled, however, that The Post has seen fit to make this overdone rehashing of the Chandra Levy story front-page news when there is so much more which is important to discuss . . . Moreover, the overt disdain for women of color who die or disappear and are relegated to a few sentences in the back of the Metro section is absolutely heartbreaking."

Leen pointed out that The Post did a series in 2000 called "Fatal Flaws" that dealt with faulty police work in 200 murder cases in which almost all the victims were African American.

The series was well reported and written, and it nailed police incompetence in stories of accessible length. But, to me, the project wasn't worth 13 days, all on Page 1, and the new information wasn't highlighted sufficiently so that readers, especially the ones who had followed the story earlier, could easily tell what had not been reported before. It was simply too much for this impatient, time-starved reader who wanted to know what the reporters found out right way.

To Leen, that "would have ruined the suspense and defeated the entire purpose of our attempt to find a new form of storytelling. We strongly feel that the reader needs to experience the story as it happened in real time to understand how and why the investigation went awry."

He's right about that, but the suspense might have held even if the first piece had better foreshadowed the major findings and readers had been told in a box what was new each day. Many of the pieces could have run inside the paper, with a Page 1 key, or only on the Web.

A longer version of this column appears on washingtonpost.com. Deborah Howell can be reached at 202-334-7582 or atombudsman@washpost.com.