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...the want-ad section." More than 60 years later, not much has changed. South L.A. is still the homicide capital of the city; most victims are young black or Latino men, and the media ignore the vast majority of cases.
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When Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy took over the police beat in 2001, she discovered that inner-city residents were furious. They believed the violence ravaging their communities should be on the front page every day, yet it often wasn't mentioned anywhere in the paper. Leovy, too, came to believe that what she calls "a public health catastrophe" was being overlooked. She decided to write only about homicides; still, she felt she was unable to convey the extent of the carnage. Given the constraints of time and news space, there was no way to memorialize every victim. After a few years on the beat, Leovy had an epiphany: She could use the Web--with its unlimited capacity--to solve a problem that has thwarted crime reporters for decades.
In January 2007, Leovy started the Homicide Report, an latimes.com blog that chronicles every slaying in the county, giving each victim's name, often with a picture, and a brief description of how the death occurred. Other newspapers have set up crime web sites, but Leovy's is the first one devoted to murders.
The Homicide Report, which receives about 300,000 hits a month, offers a starkly factual form of journalism that is more compelling than elaborate coverage would be. Leovy's dispatches are not traditional true-crime stories with surprise endings, dramatic tension, and moments of redemption. There is an austere elegance to the daily listing of victims and the numbing litany of ways in which they died: stabbings, bludgeonings, stranglings, drive-bys, walk-ups, car-to-cars, murder-suicides. An interactive graphic provides data on each crime and features a map of the county covered with red dots--one for each slaying. Occasionally she breaks from the police blotter format and posts analyses or interviews with relatives.
"My job as a journalist is to make people see something that isn't seen," she says. "You've got to follow the suffering--that's the main rule of homicide repotting.... To do that, you write about...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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