The best question from today’s live Q&A with Washington Post editors about the paper’s new digital style guide:

Could you explain to me the rules in two sentences? I understood nothing from the article. Is this like the tree of knowledge, that if you get to it you get expelled from the garden of make-believe?

A visit to the guide—-which clings to old-school journalism while begrudgingly addressing new media problems like attribution and linking—-reveals what seems like as good an answer as any to the question: “Washington Post journalists are always Washington Post journalists.”

Still, editor Peter Perl offered up this summary: “No matter how much pressure there is to deliver news faster and faster and no matter how much we desire to speak to our readers in a more direct voice, we can never forget the standards for accuracy and fairness that have always guided The Post.” He did not add, but probably could have, “That goes double for you, Mike Wise.”