If you’re into the Washington City Paper, approach this week’s issue with care — it’s not a quick read.

This week the city’s premiere alternative weekly profiles investigative journalist Murray Waas, using some 21,514 words over the course of three articles to attack his journalistic standards and detail a long-running feud between the paper’s staff and Waas. If that many words don’t mean much to you, think of it this way — only 11,000 or so made it to print, if only to save on paper (the other 10,000 are in two web-only articles). By comparison, the whole series is roughly one-fifth the word-count of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, would take up 70-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, Waas is an odd guy whose many stories often include facts that are rarely confirmed by mainstream journalists. Was saying that worth 21,514 words? Judge for yourself.

Thankfully, though, the paper relied on Editor 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 I’m still going on about this, it’s because I’m thinking of penning a 21,000-word critique. Phew. Roughly 225 words down, and lots to go.