Wemple: "The Washington Post uses old and new technologies to beat competitors to Blacksburg."

After an assist from the Post’s research unit, Ruane was on the line with the jumper by mid-afternoon. The guy wouldn’t talk but gave Ruane the number of another jumper who might be more willing to open up. That worked. Ruane quoted student Richard Mallalieu describing the onslaught: “A steady pop, pop, pop, pop.”

More phone work added to the scene reconstruction. Reporters Jose Antonio Vargas and Josh White got ahold of people who’d been inside Norris, and together with Ruane’s work, they produced a pint-size narrative of the tragedy for the next day’s editions. That reporting, in turn, fed the comprehensive narrative in the paper’s Thursday editions by David Maraniss, a piece of work that is thus far the definitive reporting achievement of the massacre.

The New York Times, with 34 reporters and stringers on the case, couldn’t even match the Post on the reconstruction. The Times confined a considerable portion of its own narrative to its Web site days after the Maraniss piece. Times National Editor Suzanne Daley writes via e-mail: “[F]or space reasons, and because we had already written a lot about the events on the second floor of Norris Hall, the final chapter of the narrative ran only on the web. It is not uncommon for us to run longer versions of stories on the web.”