WHO is in my community?

Photo by gregwake

 
Crime. The word brings to mind men in pinstriped suits chomping on Cubans, Sherlock Holmes and boozy detective novelists. This one syllable conjures up a myriad of masculine images. So, one would assume that the majority of those interested in crime are men. Wrong. I mean, I’m not exactly the burliest of the burly, and I consume crime news like a carnivore.
 
So, who is my targeted audience?
 
It runs the gambit—there’s the crime bloggers, newspaper readers, crime/metro reporters, police officers, criminals, families and friends of victims and the occasional criminal lawyer. Let’s take a quick look at each of these folks—if you’re reading this now, you may find yourself among the ranks. If not, let me know—I hate to leave anyone out in the cold (especially spies).
 
Crime bloggers are a diverse bunch. Currently, I am a member of the Google group the Coalition of Crime Bloggers. There are around 59 members of the CCB, approximately 38.9 percent of which are male, 47.4 percent are female and 13.5 percent are unknown. Not many list their occupations, but there are at least three writers, seven journalists, one lawyer and several parents. Around five were victims, or had some connection to a crime that led them to start blogging. These bloggers hail from everywhere from Long Beach, Fla. to Germany. Most are active members of the CCB community; 62.7 percent of members are both bloggers and readers.
 
There are also several true crime groups on Google that interested parties may belong to. For example, there’s True Crimes, which has 372 members. This site features discussions about news and current events, law and culture. It has medium activity, with about 40 recent posters. I also belong to alt.true-crime, a group dedicated to “criminal acts around the world.” I sent out a survey to the active posters to these groups. It reveals that most of these bloggers are middle-aged or older, with jobs ranging from writer to golf shop assistant. They come from such places as Pennsylvania, Michigan, San Francisco, California, Florida and Texas. Obviously, bloggers and message board fiends are a huge target audience for me, since they spend so much time online reading about crime.
 
Newspaper readers are also a target audience. The Chicago Sun-Times’s Web site gets 3,425,000 unique visitors a month, many of which are 25-34 and more than half of which are female. The Chicago Tribune gets 2,073,000 visitors; the majority are 25-54 and 66 percent are male. Crime news is always prominent in the papers, often making the Tribune’s Most Viewed and Most E-Mailed sections. I would most likely aim more towards the Sun-Times’s audience, since they seem to be more active online and more likely to happen upon my site. Also, the Sun-Times seems to have a more localized focus, which jives well with my Chicagocentric blog.
 
Along with newspaper readers, I also want to target newspaper writers, since—given their access—they can contribute greatly to the discussion of current events. Some writers belong to such organizations as Criminal Justice Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors, which has 4,000 members alone. These organizations were not able to give me a gender/age breakdown of their members.
 
The Chicago Tribune does not clearly distinguish between Metro writers and writers on the crime beat. According to Jason Meisner, who works at the Trib’s Metro desk, the paper has 5 “breaking news” police and fire reporters, one reporter covering the Chicago Police Department and several investigative reporters. The Chicago Sun-Times has two reporters on their crime beat, Frank Main and Annie Sweeney. I would love to get writers like these on my blog, commenting on their own stories and what they went through to break them.
 
My audience also includes a constantly rotating and changing faction of the community—the families and friends of crime victims and/or criminals. I have received several posts from this group over the course of my blogging. They come to my site once, looking for more information on people who were killed or involved in crimes. Then they never return. Hopefully, with some redesign, I will be able to keep these readers as part of my blogging community.
 
There’s also the less accessible crowd, like the 13,000 men and women of the CPD, the approximately 44,919 inmates in the Illinois prison system, the 30,000 members of the Illinois Bar Association and the 22,000 members of the Chicago Bar Association. These readers may not be as willing to post on my Web site, but I would like them in my audience all the same—just to keep things balanced. They all contribute different viewpoints on Chicago crime. My Web site is not anti anyone—be they cops, criminals or even lawyers. I think everyone involved in the crime world would be interested in how it’s being portrayed in a public forum.
 

WHAT are these folks interested in?

Photo by Livsafe 

 
My targeted audience has a wide range of interests, depending on what faction of society they come from. The members of the CCB are interested in all angles of crime: school shootings, murders, cold cases, domestic violence, sexual predators and missing persons. Discussion board posts usually consist of links to news stories related to crime. The group members who do post—and there are about five who do so regularly—don’t comment much on the posted stories; they usually ask for updates when they do.
 
The CCB members’s blogs also run the gambit of topics—there’s one on female criminals, several on neighborhood crime, many that resemble crime blotters and a multitude intended to aid certain groups. Many bloggers start Web sites in order to raise awareness of crime, and feel it their responsibility to contribute to the crime fighting effort. It also seems of great importance to report on overlooked crimes. Here are some examples of why CCB members started their blogs. These quotes all came from bloggers via e-mail.
 
Bonnie Prisbrey started Bonnie’s Blog of Crime to “respect and honor all victims, not just ones in high profile cases.”
 
Stephen McCaskill began Crime Scene Blog “to highlight cases that did not make it into the national spotlight and to use those cases as examples on how to avoid becoming a victim.”
 
Deidra Robey started her blog, Black and Missing but Not Forgotten, because she “felt that there was a need for more publication of missing black women, children and men… Missing black persons do not get as much exposure as missing white persons.”
 
While it’s pretty easy to see where the interests of bloggers lie, it’s harder to pin down what newspaper readers want to see. So, I looked at stories on the Tribune Web site to see which readers commented on. At the time of this report, there were 29 comments after the story “Burr Ridge man pleads guilty to illegal possession of 34 guns,” 20 after “Metra train kills pedestrian near Franklin Park” and 56 after “Driver leads cops on 50-mile high-speed chase.” Judging by the content of these comments, these readers are not so much interested in a discussion than an argument. For example, “RED” from Chicago, Ill., had this to say about “Driver leads cops on 50-mile high-speed chase,” “another dirt bag with a 5th grade education endangering peoples lives on the roads.” Very few posters give their real names, and their e-mail addresses are not listed, leading me to think that they post with greater abandon than the average online Joe.
 
Unlike newspaper readers, who enjoy ranting, friends and families seek out crime news to pay tribute to a person who has died (or rather, who has been killed). Back when I wrote about Roky Uriostegui, who was killed a few months ago, one reader responded, “Roky, an angel who will return to us someday when his time is right.” Somehow, for friends and families, reading and commenting about the victims serves as a way to remember them.
 
Judging by what the reporters I spoke to told me, their online crime news consumption is mostly connected to their work—finding stories, leads, etc. The same seems true for criminal lawyers. The Illinois Bar Association has a selection of discussion groups that show the interests of its members. Unfortunately, I could not read these discussions, since I am not a member, however I can say that topics include litigation, transactional law, family law, criminal-DUI-traffic. So, groups who either work in the field or write about the field are usually interested in ways to better hone their skills, or to get more information about their trade.
 
The police don’t really seem all that interested in reading crime sites. The folks at popular Chicago blog Second City Cop (who wished to remain anonymous), told me via e-mail, “Crime interests us for 8 hours a day, no more, unless they’re paying us to be interested. We don’t surf serial killer homage sites or anything like that.” Instead, their blog deals more with the city and the CPD. Lately, they wrote a piece about Anthony Abbate—the cop accused of beating a woman in a bar—that garnered a lot of anonymous comments about how the crooked cop gives the CPD a bad name. It seems that the readers of this blog are interested in talking about the CPD—the good, the bad and the ugly—and are interested in doing so anonymously.
 

WHERE do they get their news?

Photo by Thomas Hawk 

 
Overwhelmingly, my targeted audience gets their news from the Internet—which is good news for me. These readers are concerned with finding the truth, and often turn to several sources to verify the validity of the news.
 
Stephen McCaskill has approximately 100 searches that run daily for crime stories, while Deidra Robey looks at around 20 papers online a day. She finds the local papers the most reliable, “Going to the local newspaper is going straight to the source in my opinion - which of course is always the best option,” she told me via e-mail.
 
Visitors to crime message boards have the same hunger for the truth. According to my survey, 90 percent get their news from the Internet first. One respondent said, “ If can’t find an article on a past crime, I can always ask someone on the site.” According to the survey, posters visit, on average, five blogs a day. Mostly, they do so because they feel like they don’t get enough trustworthy news from the traditional sources. One respondent told me, “They get the broad strokes right, but having seen up close stories that made the news having lost a great deal of the context and nuance, I don’t trust them to give a good sense of the big picture or people’s motivations.”
 
Families and friends of victims also seem to distrust traditional news sources, often turning to more unconventional venues—like blogs—for updates. In fact, the posts on my blog that get the most hits are those concerned with victims of crime, like Martece Glass. A previous poster on my Web site—who wishes to remain anonymous—told me, via e-mail, “I approach every source critically and analytically with a basic mistrust… I tend to stay most informed about national matters by Internet discussion forums.” Readers like this are a prime audience for my blog, which takes a more unconventional look at news.
 
Newspaper readers—obviously—get their news from the papers and the Internet. Readers of the Chicago Tribune turn to the The Blotter on the paper’s Web site, where newspaper bloggers enter updates on all the most recent crimes. Here, interested parties may comment on the various stories and check for new developments.
 
While bloggers and citizens act as the press’s watchdogs, reporters also take great pains to get the news from all angles. Still, they pay much less attention to blogs than the average citizen, relying more on traditional news outlets. Tribune reporter Jason Meisner says that most of his stories are local, so he reads all the local papers, as well as local TV and radio Web sites. Azam Ahmed, another Tribune Metro reporter, also turns to traditional media outlets to get the news, keeping up with the The Blotter to learn about developments.
 
Police, like the bloggers and citizens, don’t seem to trust the news. (Bad news for people of my profession.) When asked whom they trusted for the news, Second City Cop responded: “Anyone except the dead tree media or the lame stream media. We use them mostly to make points, but we don’t trust them to present anyone with actual truth - we’ve known too many falsehoods they publish because we were there and they got it wrong.” Instead, SCC visits 30 to 60 Web sites a day, including blogs, the Drudge Report and Breitbart.com.
 

HOW does my audience communicate?

Picture by DailyPic

 
Depending on their professions and interests, the members of my audience converse in a myriad of ways.
 
Bloggers usually communicate through mediums such at the Coalition of Crime Bloggers and online message boards. None of the bloggers interviewed said they meet in public. They’re fairly happy with the current medium, but some offered suggestions for improvement:
 
“I think a Crime Wiki site would be a great site, so that all bloggers and crime enthusiasts and professionals could add to it.”—Bonnie Prisbrey
 
“I would like to see more work done with the authorities, getting the word out on breaking news, cases, and suspect descriptions. With our ability to instantly update information I think we could be very good at getting the word out quickly and efficiently.”—Stephen McCaskill
 
“I do think that down the road it would be great to have crime blogger conferences/seminars where bloggers could meet and chat about what they’re up to and the latest efforts they’re working on.”—Jason Kandel
 
Trench Reynolds, who helped to found the CCB, told me, “I wish we could get more attention, we’re a very unappreciated niche in the blogosphere.” He thinks that if all bloggers pooled their resources, they could create the best crime site out there. So, it seems bloggers would like the crime community to be both more legitimate and more interactive.
 
While bloggers have a cohesive community, newspaper readers often use online message boards and false names to interact with other people and to discuss crime. I was unable to contact these posters, since their e-mail addresses are not listed. However, these same people may also attend Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy meetings in their respective police districts. People who attend these meetings tend to be very community-oriented, and are up on current events.
 
Crime reporters have several organizations out there that cater to their needs, such as Criminal Justice Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors. CJJ has a listserv/discussion list to which members may subscribe. Here they can look for contacts, talk about the business and find out about any upcoming conferences. The CJJ also has several conferences and workshops at which members can meet. Investigative Reporters and Editors hosts conferences, and also has a networking section on its site. Primarily, it provides training and education to those interested in investigative journalism, as well as information on the latest investigative work.
 
Several reporters are also bloggers, like CCB member Jason Kandel. In addition to writing his blog, Mean Streets, Kandel works as a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News. He seems satisfied with the crime blogging community, telling me over e-mail: “From what I’ve seen it appears there is a really robust segment of crime blogging out there that fulfills just about every niche.”
 
Other reporters, like Ahmed, don’t interact much online—they prefer talking with colleagues in person. Ahmed, however had a great suggestion for a Web site:
 
“A lot of times, when you see the finished product [news story], if you don’t know what went into it there’s sort of this mystery surrounding it. [On Web sites such as the Poynter Institute] reporters will talk about how they went about reporting the story. And that’s one of the benefits of being in a place like the Tribune. When you look at a project, or an investigative piece, just walk down the newsroom and be like ‘Hey, what was that like doing that?’ You have access to these incredibly talented people. I’m all about that, that’s one of the best ways to learn. And if a Web site could do that, that would be great.”
 
Police officers seem very active in the blogosphere, but they seem to enjoy discussion rather than gathering information. While they have official blogs, like the Chicago Police Department Weblog, unofficial blogs like Second City Cop and Second City Sarge are more popular. The writers of these blogs prefer to remain anonymous, while discussing recent crimes and Chicago goings on with wit and (sometimes) an edge.
 
When asked what SCC would like done to improve the mechanisms for meeting and communicating about common interests, they replied, “We operate on the platform we’re comfortable with.” So, at present, this community seems satisfied with the resources available. However, the fact that all posters communicate anonymously suggests that they cannot truly converse freely about subjects of interest.
 
There are a lot of resources out there for the families and friends of victims, such as People Helping People and Families & Friends of Violent Crime Victims. Still, these people often post on my blog, turning my posts into memorials to those who died. I never see them post on newspaper Web sites, but on my site they come right out and tell me their relation to the victim. It seems that these people need somewhere to discuss what has happened. I hope to continue to be a site where people feel comfortable doing this.