utilized crime data and geography in major metropolitan US centres."The sheer volume is shocking,' wrote another. 'Almost like they're disposable people,' wrote a third."Holovaty's motives for launching chicagocrime.org were in keeping with journalism's goals of generating local "news you can use" along with its increasingly technical identity and focus on "cool technical things" (Holovaty,
2005). The goals of Homicide Report's founder, Los Angeles Times journalist Jill Leovy, were more critical. Leovy wanted to account for all homicides in Los Angeles County in order to deconstruct traditional journalism norms and practices that saw only certain homicides covered (Leovy, 2008; Young & Hermida, 2015).? In a 2015 interview with National Public Radio's Fresh Air, Leovy articulated her motives for launching the Homicide Report as a response to structural bias in the news, and her frustration that newspaper reporting on crime "paled to the reality so much":
The newspaper's job is to cover unusual events, and when it comes to homicide, that always ends up meaning that you're covering the very low edges of the bell curve.(Leovy, 2015)
By combining her experience as a crime journalist with the endless, less hierarchical space of digital journalism (compared to a newspaper front page) and access to public data, Leovy (2008) envisioned a news report that represented information about all the killings in the county, "mostly of young Latinos and, most disproportionately, of young Black men," with as much equivalence as possible (Leovy, 2015). According to Leovy (2008), the response was powerful: "Readers responded strongly.As novel articulations of a growing subspecialty, these examples of data journalism received commendation and acclaim for innovation.And both provide insight into persistent critiques and challenges related to the aims and impacts of data-driven journalism, and journalism in general.Those homicides have gone on in the same form, in the same ways, for so long in America, particularly American cities, that they are the wallpaper of urban life.The site, chicagocrime.org, according to Holovaty (2008), was even part of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.But questions about whose
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It was later re-envisioned as an algorithmic journalism blog.And you're never the bulge in the middle because that's implicitly the routine homicides, even though, of course, a homicide is never routine.'Oh my God, began one of the first posts by a reader.They are taken for granted, and it's very difficult to make them into a narrative and a story that works for a newspaper.