Correction: An earlier version of this story indicated that Mark Leibovich recently won a Pulitzer Prize. Leibovich won a National Magazine Award. We regret the error. 

Talk about spin! The Washington Post is depicting the departure of Style section editor Ned Martel as a win for all.

News of Martel’s demotion broke Wednesday morning (reported earlier by Fishbowl DC) in gleeful emails by Style writers who have reviled his management style for the past two years. Actually, it seems, the scent of Martel’s demise started to fill the newsroom last week.

But in a memo Wednesday afternoon, Post editor Marcus Brauchli and deputy Liz Spayd were “pleased to announce that one of the newsroom’s great creative forces . . . will soon move to join our formidable political team in covering the 2012 presidential campaign.”

Read through the adjectives, and allow me to translate:

Brauchli and Spayd have been fielding complaints about Martel for months. He is widely blamed for the departure of Robin Givhan, the Post’s longtime fashion writer who won a Pulitzer but abandoned ship in December for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Photo-illustration by John Ueland.

Jennifer Rubin, the Post’s first right-wing blogger, takes pains to point out that she doesn’t fight with Greg Sargent, who pens Plum Line, the Post’s liberal blog. “There is no competition or rivalry between Greg and I,” she says in an e-mail.

But all the Post writers seem to be fair game. Ezra Klein, who has fostered the “reported opinion” writing that Rubin says she practices, is part of what Rubin calls “the left punditocracy” and one of the “media surrogates” of the Democratic Party.

Rubin has whacked op-ed writers Richard Cohen and Eugene Robinson, and Sargent has come in for some harsh words as well.

“The Post, unlike a lot of journals, encourages dialogue that goes back and forth,” Rubin says. “It’s unique in the mainstream media.”

Says editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, who hired Rubin and Sargent: “It’s what you want that space to be.”

Wilber's years of police reporting led him to look into the Reagan shooting. Photograph by Stephen Barrett.

In the summer of 2008, reporter Del Quentin Wilber got a tip that the feds had launched an undercover investigation into DC taxi licensing. Word got back to FBI agents that Wilber was onto the story. Fearing he would blow their investigation, they brought him into the FBI’s Washington office.

At some point, then–FBI field-office chief Joe Persichini reached into his desk and pulled out a pistol. It was the RG-14 22-caliber revolver that John Hinckley Jr. had used to shoot President Reagan on March 30, 1981. The gun had been in the bureau’s museum.

A week earlier, Wilber had covered Hinckley’s hearing in federal court to gain more release time from St. Elizabeths, the psychiatric hospital where he’s been since the assassination attempt.

Persichini slapped the pistol into Wilber’s hand.

“Now I was intrigued,” Wilber recalls. “If this was the way the gun that had almost killed Reagan was being treated, how much attention had been paid to the story of that day?”

He checked the library and found little. He rang up Jerry Parr—Reagan’s chief Secret Service agent that day had retired and was living in the District. They met for lunch at a deli near DC’s Tenley Circle. Parr talked and talked.

There’s a book here, Wilber thought.

Being an old-fashioned sort, I scrolled to the bottom of washingtonpost.com Wednesday morning and clicked on the line that would allow me to see the Post front page in daily newsprint form. I was greeted by this line:

“We are experiencing some technical difficulties . . . We regret the temporary inconvenience.”

Frustrated, I quit the site for Huffington Post and the New York Times. Luckily, the Post’s “Today’s Paper” feature is back up and running today, but I fear other problems with the Web site’s latest redesign aren’t temporary; they seem to be persistent and littered across nearly every page, which come off as more cluttered, dizzying, complex, and hard to navigate under the new system.

Washington Post subscribers soon might be surprised to find a hefty package dropped at their home, with a new Sunday Style tabloid and a separate arts section.

Didn’t the Post kill Sunday Style a few years ago and merge it with its arts coverage?

“We’re making a major investment in the Sunday print edition,” says features czar Kevin Sullivan. “This has been my baby.”

On the business side, investing in the Sunday sections reflects two factors: Publisher Katharine Weymouth has balanced the paper’s profit-and-loss statement by cutting staff, and she hopes that the newspaper, rather than the Internet, can still provide revenue and growth.

But in the newsroom, writers and editors are asking: Who’s going to write for these new Sunday sections? “It’s a fair criticism to say we have lost people and not replenished the staff,” executive editor Marcus Brauchli tells Post Watch. “We need fresh talent in Style.”

For the Washington Post’s Jason Reid, covering the Redskins has been “a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job” ever since he came on board in 2007. In his new role as the Post’s sports columnist, he’s expected to write not just about the Redskins but also about the Wizards, Nationals, and Capitals, not to mention Georgetown and the University of Maryland. And Reid isn’t just taking a new job—he’s replacing the latest star to flee the Post for new opportunities, Michael Wilbon, a man who was decidedly more pessimistic about Washington’s sports scene than Reid says he is today.

“I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me,” says Reid, 41.

But developing his knowledge base is only the first of Reid’s challenges. Wilbon is one of the most well-known sports commentators in the country. For years, Wilbon has cohosted ESPN’s PTI: Pardon the Interruption and also served as a studio analyst for the network’s NBA coverage, in addition to his columnist duties at the newspaper.

As for Reid? Well, he’s a good beat reporter, having covered the Dodgers and Clippers for the Los Angeles Times and the Redskins for the Post. It’s clear he knows the difference between his experience and Wilbon’s job.

“I’ve never been a columnist before,” he says. “It’s hard for me to sit here and imagine every scenario in which I’d be writing a column, but I’d say that you have to play the role of an advocate. If you’re not speaking for the fans, then that’s a mistake.”