“The news about the news, for the most part, has stunk for some time: There’s been cowardly and crappy decision-making in scary times; ethics, at times, have been mislaid; lousy things have found their way into print, and worthy things — killed for unworthy reasons — have not. I am not shocked that tempers boiled over, nor am I shocked that they boiled over between two people who know what has been happening, and care.”

– WaPo’s Gene Weingarten weighs in, sort of, on yesterday’s fisticuffs in the Post newsroom. The whole essay is more than worth your time, additionally so for the Henry Allen excerpts. Who knew an entire industry could yearn for the day when ‘”what we put in the paper” was worth exchanging blows over.

Washingtonian is reporting that Allen, a newspaper stalwart in his late 60s, punched Roig-Franzia after a disagreement over a collaborative story Roig-Franzia had been working on with fellow Style-section writer Monica Hesse. Their editor thought it was garbage, unworthy of the Style section:

Allen took a look and didn’t like. He started ranting about the number of mistakes he had found.

Hesse at one point asked him to send the copy back to her. She got a bit teary at the verbal beatdown.

Allen, according to sources, said: “This is total crap. It’s the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years.”

Roig-Franzia then wandered into the newsroom. A veteran foreign correspondent, he has been turning out political features for Style. He heard Allen’s rant and stopped by his desk.

“Oh, Henry,” he supposedly said, “don’t be such a cocks—–.”

That set off the former Marine editor:

Allen lunged at Roig-Franzia, threw him to the newsroom floor, and started throwing punches. Roig-Franzia tried to fend him off.

Allegedly, the old-timey Allen was not thrilled with the “charticle” Roig-Franzia and Hesse had been working on, favoring the days when the paper allowed a writer to take “a hundred inches on the wonder of plastic lawn furniture or the true meaning of the Vietnam War Memorial.”

It seems like we’re seeing this story play out over and over again: newspapers are changing. And apparently, in order to save it, some will go down swinging.

Check out a full recounting of the story here.