GOAL

 
When I first started my site, my mission statement read: “I’m here to bring you the latest in Chicago crime news– the good, the bad and the ugly. Because in a city like Chicago, where Al Capone is the eternal mascot, there’s always something on the police blotter.”
 
That’s still my mission, but now I aim to expand upon it. I aim to create a Web site where people from all factions of my audience can go to find news that they can trust.
 
Right now, my blog caters mostly to the crime blogging community. I want to change that. I want to tell stories from all angles—that of the reporter, the cop, the witness, the loved one and the crime blog enthusiast.
 
Currently, I merely introduce a news story, and then try to put it into some kind of context for my readers. With my redesign, I hope to bring other voices into the conversation, launching a Wikipedia of crime where people in the community may add to stories, contest facts and talk about what’s going on in the world of Chicago crime.
 

COMMUNITY PROFILE

 
Right now, I don’t know much about my current readers. I posted a survey on my Web site to get some insight, and only a few people responded. From looking at Google Analytics, I know that most of my readers come from the U.S.—specifically Illinois. Most of these visitors come from Chicago, which is no surprise given my subject matter. The majority of these hits come from Northwestern University—again, no surprise.
 
But rather than dwell too much on where my audience is from, I’d rather focus on what they’re looking at. The stories that get the most hits on my site are those about Chicago citizens who have been murdered—stories that usually get one paragraph in the local papers. Most of these hits come from the city as well, and almost none of them come from Northwestern. This is the audience that I’m aiming for—the people of Chicago who are interested in Chicago-specific crime.
 
The audience that I hope to reach comes from every corner of the crime world—crime bloggers, newspaper readers, reporters, cops, inmates, families and friends of victims and criminal lawyers. So it’s very hard to talk about them as a cohesive group. Still, they all have one trait in common—distrust.
 
This group is a shifty bunch—and I say that in the most loving sense of the word. Citizens and bloggers don’t trust the news or the cops. The cops don’t trust the news. And the news really only trusts itself. I aim to reach all these groups, while giving even the smallest stories their due. People want to read about the people they know, the people they care about. I can provide a place for them to do so.
 

BLOG PLAN

 
• Launch a Wiki version of Watching the Detectives
• Hire a team of writers and technicians— reporters, cops, crime bloggers, lawyers, etc—to update and maintain the site
• Invite members of all communities in my potential audience to comment and contribute– do so via message boards, blogs posts and mass e-mail
• Include easily searchable features so that people can find the news that they need and want
• Include interactive CLEARpath technology—ala the CPD and Everyblock.org—so that people can gauge crime via maps and street-level web cams
• Include cell phone alerts that will inform readers when a crime happens in the neighborhood of their choice