Jill Leovy

After becoming a crime correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in 2002, Jill Leovy came to believe inner-city violence was occurring at the level of “a public health catastrophe” for African American men—who make up 40 percent of American murder victims annually—and launched a website called Homicide Report to chronicle every murder in the county; it listed 1,133 in 2004 alone. She wrote a book based on her reporting, Ghettoside. The Times later shuttered her blog and no longer covers every murder in the second-largest city in the country.