Stuff You Can't Do Without the Internet: All the Murders

Jill Leovy has a riveting story in the LA Times (print edition) about how she covered the murders--all the murders--in LA last year (link). The print version ordinarily covers only about 10 percent:

I wanted readers to see all the killings -- roughly 1,000 violent deaths each year, mostly of young Latinos and, most disproportionately, of young black men. The Web offered what the paper did not: unlimited space.

So the Homicide Report, as it was called, began with the simplest of journalistic missions: exposing a painful, largely unseen problem.The first list of homicide victims, published just over a year ago, contained the names of 17 people. Eight were Latino. Six were black. Two were of Cambodian descent -- killed in a double homicide. None were white. Most were in their 20s. ...

Two or three homicides occurred in the county per day, on average. As the report developed, I filled notebooks with police jargon, scrawling the same details over and over. "Male black adult" or "Male Hispanic" -- accompanied by addresses in Compton, Florence, Hawthorne, Boyle Heights or Watts. ...

Detectives routinely admitted that the names and ages they had recorded for victims were, at best, conjecture: Many victims, including illegal immigrants or career criminals, had lived entirely underground.

Leovy says her bosses moved her on to other things (why, I wonder?). But, she says, "none of the more ambitious stories I'd previously done for the paper seemed quite as effective as simply listing victims, one by one by one."