City Paper Attacks Minutemen Coach
In 32,352-Word Cover Feature

As noted on DCist.com:

“This week, the city’s premiere alternative weekly profiles Express 20-Minutemen manager Chris Mincher, using some 32,352 words in the course of three articles to attack his softball coaching standards and detail a long-running feud between the paper’s staff and Mincher. If that many words don’t mean much to you, think of it this way - only 23,000 or so made it to print, if only to save on paper (the other 9,000 are in two Web-only articles). By comparison, the whole series is roughly one-fourth the word-count of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, would take up 100-plus pages in a Word document and now ranks as the longest piece the paper has ever published.

As a service to DCist readers, we’ll summarize - according to the City Paper, Mincher is a incompetent judge of talent whose many lineup changes often include substitutions that make little sense to opposing managers. Was saying that worth 32,352 words? Judge for yourself.

Thankfully, though, the paper relied on its own manager, Mark Kalyan Rutherford “Spanky” Kalyan, editor-in-chief Erik Wemple and senior writer Jason Cherkis for the story, saving themselves what would be a huge payout to a freelancer charging by the word. And if you’re wondering why we’re still going on about this, it’s because we’re thinking of penning a 21,000-word critique. Phew. Roughly 225 words down, and lots to go.”