Opinions

The ombudsman is being bombarded by input from readers, via e-mail and phone calls, about the story that Post reporter Jason Horowitz wrote on Mitt Romney’s teenage years at the prestigious Cranbrook School in Michigan.

The story leads with an anecdote about Romney and some of his friends in his dormitory tackling and pinning to the ground an unpopular classmate and forcibly cutting off his bleached-blond, longish hair. The boy, John Lauber, was frightened and in tears, Horowitz explained, and the boy turned out to be gay.

The rest of the deeply reported story provides extensive context to Romney’s years there, what the school was like, where Romney fit in the boys’ hierarchy, and the fact that a lot of people liked the son of Michigan’s then-governor, George Romney.

Conservative Web sites have criticized the piece on several grounds.

The first is that The Post changed the text of one paragraph from the online version published on Thursday to the print version published on Friday without telling readers. It’s a description of how one of Romney’s high school friends, Stu White, felt after hearing about the hair-cutting prank. White was not present at the prank.

Twice in recent months, the Post has made a major change with no public announcement or explanation to readers ahead of time.

In January, it was a 25-cent increase in the cover price, from 75 cents to $1, that just suddenly appeared one day. (Home subscribers got a price increase too, although it was noted in the mailed bills.)

Then last week, The Post switched its free “Today’s Paper” online feature — where you could see and read digitized versions of the daily printed newspaper pages — to a fee-based system. A third party, NewspaperDirect.com, which distributes many print versions of publications electronically, operates the “e-Replica” setup.

Actually, NewspaperDirect has done this for The Post for about six years, for a fee, and The Post says it didn’t make sense to have two versions, one free and one paid.

Here’s my list of some of the best Post stories that put an analytical eye on Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts; some were written during the 2007-08 presidential campaign, and some are from the past year during his second run for the presidency.

 I’ll do a similar list on The Post stories looking critically at Barack Obama in the next couple of weeks.

--For an excellent character study of Romney, how he thinks about politics, and how he sees himself, see Ann Gerhart’s profile in The Post’s weeklong series of stories in December about the GOP presidential candidates, “The Contenders.”

Aside from its status as the nation’s capital, Washington is the home to several professional sports teams. And when one of these teams does something noteworthy, editors here find themselves facing tough choices about when it’s the right time to put sports news (that also happens to be local) on Page A1, as opposed to the front of the Sports section.

Take, for example, the recent lead-up to the start Thursday of the NFL Draft. A photo of quarterback Robert Griffin III, this year’s Heisman Trophy winner, was splashed across Page One last Sunday, accompanying a lengthy profile of the player that many expected (correctly) would be the Redskins’ top draft pick. Some readers felt this was a better fit for the Sports front rather than for a newspaper’s most coveted real estate on A1.

Sometimes it’s difficult to identify trends in e-mail and phone calls. Not because we aren’t receiving them — believe me, we are — but because the topics readers are concerned about vary.

But leave it to a good government scandal to get people riled up. Namely, a 2010 Las Vegas conference of the General Services Administration (GSA), a government agency that is supposed to ensure that government purchases are given to the lowest bidders and taxpayer funds are not wasted. GSA spent more than $800,000 on its conference in Sin City, which included a mind reader, a clown and the purchase of bicycles for a team building activity.

Reader reaction differed. Some wrote in to vent while others criticized The Posts’s coverage and treatment of the scandal. Either way, our readers reminded us that they are also taxpayers, and the perceived misuse of their money isn’t something they take lightly.

Surprisingly, we haven’t received much regarding the Secret Service incident with prostitutes in Colombia.

Then there’s President Obama’s recent tax proposal to make sure that taxpayers who earn most of their income from interest and dividends pay an equivalent tax rate to wage earners — otherwise known as the “Buffett rule,” named for billionaire financier and major shareholder in The Washington Post Company Warren E. Buffett — which has also provoked reader response.