Hi.

I started blogging about crime in late 2004 because I've always been fascinated by the subject and because the Internet was changing the way stories unfolded. Kept at it through late 2009. It became my job, led to something resembling a career in journalism. I was on TV, was widely published online, and sometimes it was fascinating and fun and sometimes it was stressful and weird and eventually, around the time I made one of my bigger TV appearances (for CBS's 48 Hours Mystery), it was too damned much. I didn't exactly quit writing, but I'd had enough of true crime.

That hasn't really changed. I have had enough of true crime, as a distinct genre of nonfiction. That's different, in my mind, from crime news. True crime requires a certain (sometimes hyperbolic) style and attitude. With a few exceptions, I don't like much true crime anymore. When I read true crime books, they're almost always about historic cases, not anything from the last 20 years or so.

But I still follow a lot of major crime stories as closely as I ever did. I still think about this stuff. People still have me talk about it on podcasts and radio shows.

So recently I realized maybe I had something to say again. Perhaps just plain old news aggregation blogging (links and quotes with commentary), sometimes reporting, as long as I can vet it like the professional I've supposedly become. After all,  I'm a different person from when I was one of the originators of "true crime" blogging. I've had on-the-job training in journalism, for one thing. Some of it even took. I've run blogs as a job, covering whatever my supervising editors thought would bring the pageviews. I've covered a wide variety of other news, including tech blogging. As a tech blogger for the New York Observer's Betabeat I naturally gravitated toward cybercrime coverage--so you'll find a good deal of that here, because it's a fascinating new frontier, one that's often more the purview of tech blogs than crime blotters.

Truth: I find nuts and bolts reporting tough, sometimes. I'm not a natural at picking up the phone and asking strangers tough questions. I'd do better in person, but my life is arranged in such a way that just jaunting off to story location x or y isn't a practical option. If I do have a gift, it's probably spotting a big story before it really pops. I hope to bring that to this blog.

Some aspects of my past crime blogging may be gone--I have no intention of doing any of this by request, for instance. One thing that really undercut my interest in keeping a 'personal' (that is, I'm not doing it as a job) crime blog in the past was sometimes feeling I was pandering, or taking what amounted to story assignments from people. Tips are great, but requests to cover your pet missing persons or unsolved case are not. I can't do that sort of thing and keep this up.

I also have no plans to task myself to update this thing every day. I may end up doing just that; but I'd rather err on the side of quality than quantity. Too many bloggers, especially those of us who've done it for a check sometimes, work too fast and put out too much and a lot of errors enter the record.

And I'm serious about being a different person. I've lost 100 pounds and am in the best shape of my life. I live in New England now, having moved here from the South for my wife's job a year ago. Social media has gone bonkers since I was deep in crime coverage in the past, and I participate in a pretty non-serious way and enjoy the hell out of it.  All this will surely affect the way I dive into stories--or not.

So even though I'm supposedly one of the oldest old hands at this, apparently I'm still figuring it out as I go along.

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By the way, I have other sites that I update as I feel like it:

• Huff's Blog--I've written a bit about my fitness and weight loss here. It's basically a personal blog but I did recently decide that I'd do more newsy blogging instead. If I write about something in the news that's not crime-related, it'll be at that address.
• My Tumblr--Probably the closest thing to a personal blog now. I kind of use it when Twitter's character limit is a problem for whatever I have to say.
• Occultica--Just a Tumblr I keep to record weird stuff.