Editor at Washington Post Claims "Charticle" is Last Straw

All hell broke loose over at the Washington Post last Friday when features editor, Henry Allen, shoved and punched one of the Post’s Style writers, who called him a very naughty name that rhymes with rockpucker.

Allen was less than pleased with a piece of journalism presented at the weekly meeting held between the writers and the editors of the Style section of the Post. Following the meeting, Allen got “all up in” Style writer, Monica Hesse’s face over an article he described as a “charticle,” forcing Hesse’s co-writer, Manuel Roig-Franzia, to come to her defense. He did so by alling-cay Allen-ay an ocksucker-cay. By the way, a charticle is described as an article that fuses text and graphics, and a journalistic style (no pun intended) that is frowned upon in the journalism business. In addition to the style faux pas, the charticle contained several errors that pissed Allen off to no end.

The fight (actually, Allen punched Roig-Franzia and Roig-Franzia took it like a Style magazine journalist) occurred in front of the office of Executive Editor ,Marcus Brauchli, and in fact, Brauchli was one of the people in the room who helped pull Allen off Roig-Franzia.

Immediately following the incident, Allen was called into Brauchli’s office and appropriately read the riot act, which appears each week in the editorial section of the newspaper. In addition, Allen was barred from the newsroom for the remainder of his career, which just happens to be a few days from now, as he has already announced his retirement effective November 20, 2009.

So, with Allen out of the picture, Roig-Franzia is up for Allen’s job and claims that if he becomes the features editor, there will be more of the same type of journalism where “charticles” come from. Here’s a tentative list that he’s come up with:

Particle – Fuses half the story with lots of pictures.
Grapharticle – Fuses useless graphs with lots of text (not to be confused with charticle).
Pharticle – Fuses photos with really clever captions.
Emoticle – Fuses happy news with smiley faces.
Antarticle – Fuses cold hard facts with cold hard graphics.
OMGarticle – Fuses text messages with graphic graphics.
Politicle – Confuses politics with text.
Errarticle – Fuses glaring errors with photos that don’t match.
Freeforarticle – Fuses face with fist.
Satarticle – What you just read on Glossy News.