The Twelve Days of Chandra

The Washington Post's 12-part series on the disappearance and murder of Chandra Levy is the talk of the town, with a lot of people scratching their heads over why The Post would devote 12 stories to a years-old case that was covered ad nauseum at the time.

I blogged last week that I thought the series was a failed experiment, and it seems like a lot of people agree with me. It's been a hot topic on WashingtonPost.com discussion boards and today Post reporter Robert Pierre came out and blasted his own paper for, essentially, wasting space on the case of a pretty white woman while ignoring the city's black murder victims. He's got a point. And there's another tough critique of the series–and the choices behind it–here.

On the other hand, I hear the series is doing great traffic on the Web–it turns out that Chandra Levy conspiracy theorists are a hardy bunch–and I got into a conversation today with somebody who was defending the project and made me rethink my view of it a bit.

The trick is to separate the subject matter from the format, which resembles an old-time newspaper serial, with short stories and daily cliffhangers. The fundamental problem with the Levy series is that the subject is overdone and, unfortunately, The Post's reporters don't seem to have come up with much new information (although there are hints that they'll point the finger at a possible suspect by the series' end). Given the 12-part format, with each story only about 1,500 words, this makes for very thin daily reading. There just isn't enough meat in any of the bite-sized stories to make them really interesting, and in the end the serial format smacks of a marketing ploy ("Buy tomorrow's paper to find out more!").

But I now wonder if the serial format would work better with a more weighty topic. Typical Post series tend to be well-reported and meaty–but ponderous, requiring a significant commitment of time to read the 4,000-5,000 words of each installment. The Post's excellent, Pulitzer-winning series on Vice President Cheney, for instance, was full of rich detail, but quite a big meal to sit down to each day. It might have worked much better in the 12-part serial format, or something similar.

The Post gets some points for experimenting with the form, though I continue to think they picked the wrong topic for this particular experiment. Hopefully they'll keep trying until they find a way to present series in a manner that works optimally, online and off. It would be fascinating to hear what incoming Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli thinks of the Levy series. Next time, the call about how to present something like this will be up to him.

Update: Turns out the 12-part Chandra series is now a 13-part series! Oy.

Comments

[Howard Owens]

It's one thing to fault how the story was handled, another to question the value of the story.

Should Chandra Levy have gotten all the media attention she did/the story did in early 2001?

Probably not. Maybe even, absolutely not.

But it did. That makes it ripe for legitimate follow up today.

Should the post do an equally in-depth (if not more so) about black-on-black homicide? Without a doubt.

But is this an either/or case? No. To say so is a red herring. Both stories deserve coverage, and covering one doesn't make the other mutually excluded.

[ed]

Oh, please spare me from 12-part series. Note the number of comments on the Post series dwindles daily, as I suspect does the readership of each episode. The multi-part series had its day before TV and other daily distractions, and the backlash to this one has been such that I doubt Brauchli will make the mistake again.

[jackparsons]

Multipart series' work best when they're a group of diverse stories around a general theme. To pull one out of my rear: a three to five part investigation of corruption in city government, school funding, etc. The idea is that the individual pieces are hardy enough to stand on their own even while the series adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

I'm not looking for a 12 part narrative on a single issue. The hardcore conspiracy theorists will just buy the book if they want something of that length. And in any case, this "presumption of innocence about 5 years too late" was done before, and in a better format -- John and Patsy Ramsey interviewed by Bill Curtis long after the story had faded from the headlines on A&E.

Now... A five part series on Missing Cute White Woman Syndrome, from Jon Benet to Nathalie Holloway? Confrontational interviews with the likes of Nancy Grace and other talking heads that have risen the crest to TV news stardom on the back of completely inflamatory and insane rhetoric about what is, in a country of 280 million people and 6 billion worldwide, a very minor issue?

I would have bought that. That's intelligent, it's something I'm interested in, and something I can't currently find elsewhere.

[abdul rahim]

the proper pronoun for Washington Post is it, not they, unless you plan to say "The Washington Post are."

the Levy series is an insult to readers. At this point, the Compost has not told readers anything new.

[Mark Potts]

Well, the newspaper ("it") did not choose the format of the series; the editors ("they") did. And since we're picking on style points, sentences usually start with capital letters. Thanks for your comment, though.

[kob]

I can see both sides. There was a shooting, one of many, in DC the other day. A couple from Falls Church was on 9th Street NW. A group of six men approach in what may have been a carjacking. The driver tries to get away but someone fired a gun and killed the woman passenger.

This story, one of the more horrific stories in the daily slaughter here, was treated as a news brief. I haven't seen follow-up coverage (apologize if I missed it) so I don't know if it's been resolved. The story seems to merit attention and it isn't getring it. But most of murders of in city get very little attention.

I have been reading the Chandra Levy story and I think the reporting is very good. It seems as if they are framing a good argument for the most likely suspect in the case and you can only hope that the reporting is good enough to really connect someone with the crime.

The Post can't cover every murder in the city. I do hope one of the messages from the Chandra Levy series is that reporters/newspapers can do the job and have a role to play.