Perhaps most frustrating of all is that Twitter has not been particularly responsive to the paper's plight. Reso filed a support ticket, and received an automatic message informing her that she could "expect a response in a few days," which, she adds, "in the digital world is months." Several hours later, around 5:30 ET yesterday, she received an email from Mark Luckie, Twitter's creative content manager, instructing her to forward her ticket number to an email address for media. "Since then," she says, "I haven’t heard anything." (I have reached out to Twitter for comment, but have not received a response.)

In the meantime, the paper has published its new weekly issue, but the staff has been unable to promote it via Twitter. For a site like City Paper's, Twitter is essential for getting their work out there. "Our webpage is not many people’s homepage, the way nytimes.com is," Denvir said in an interview. "Our articles that have the most impact—say my discovery a few weeks ago that a sixth-grader had died after allegedly falling sick at one of our resource-starved schools with no nurse on duty—get attention because they are shared." Denvir is also holding a story on an a new project devoted to collecting school-by-school stories on the effects of the city's education budget crisis. "But," he added, "I can’t hold off forever. Pressing news."

Denvir says that the incident has pushed him to consider the relationships that now exist among media organizations and the social tools they rely on to spread their work. "It had never really hit home for me before that we all depend on these external social media entities, controlled by private companies, to provide a service that is now integral to publishing news online," he remarked. "It is not a service we pay for. It is not a service that we—or for that matter anyone else—can provide internally. So being shut out of Twitter, the best we can do is beg via online forms and hope that they let us back in soon. It’s really strange."

At this point, Reso just wants to know when the problem will be fixed. "If we had some expectation as to when this would be resolved, or when we could anticipate a response, it wouldn’t feel like we were at the mercy of Twitter," she says. "But we haven’t received any updates from them since filing our ticket. We’re completely in the dark."

Update 2:53 pm: As a workaround, City Paper has created a Tumblr and is tweeting links that direct to there. From the Tumblr, readers can click through to the full versions of stories at the City Paper site. With the workaround in place, they have now published Denvir's story, and tweeted a link to the short version of it that lives on Tumblr.

Update 5:36: I have been informed by Reso that links to City Paper from Twitter are working again, though Twitter has not provided an explanation.