And, after a very long night, we're back in business.... I'm going to do a little catch up in the next few posts before I get back into the swing of things.

One thing I missed was Ms. Leovy's Column One, "Unlimited space for untold sorrow," which chronicles a year of The Homicide Report. Now, I've made no secret of my great respect for what she's done as a journalist and the effort she's put into that blog, so it's no surprise that I liked the column. I won't embarrass myself with further flattery, but I did notice some very noteworthy bits...

The coroner provided a basic list of victims. But much of the information about the killings had to be wrung from police agencies spread across 400 square miles, or from crime scenes or victims' families. I worked mostly out of my car, fanning to the south and east of my office.

When I first presented a list of victims to the state Department of Motor Vehicles for photos, the clerks were baffled. Twenty young people every week? "What is this?" one asked. "Did a plane crash?"

That's a pretty sad commentary on how disconnected we are from the realities of murder and violence in our society. I suppose it's not a surprise that the DMV would wonder about this (reporters ask them for pictures for all sorts of reasons, so they probably don't keep track of how many come from homicide), but you'd think that the cops' media relations folks would be screaming for attention on this, not surprised that they can give the details.

Sweeping characterizations about homicides, so prevalent in media coverage and public discourse, fell apart. A term such as "gang-related" had a dozen meanings.

Once, three police officers, all working in the same division and all claiming personal knowledge, gave me three assessments of the same young man. One described him as a violent gang member; the second said he was a gang member who had committed no serious crimes; the third said he wasn't a gang member at all.

Rick and I have discussed this many times, how elusive the notion of truth is. We in the media tend to treat things as fact if they come from an official source, but I'm always surprised at how flexible those facts can be-- not because anyone's lying, just because they're going on different information or have different impressions. Then we further compound it by printing it as the truth, even if it's just "police said he was a gang member." While that's true, police did say it, as Ms. Leovy points out, not all officers, or attorneys, or even family members agree on this.

I interviewed a kid trying to get out of the Rollin' 60s once and he told me all his brothers were gangsters. He'd joined because he'd watched one get murdered and wanted revenge. When I called his dad, the father told me all his sons had bad friends, but they weren't gang members. The truth, whatever that is, lies somewhere in between.

The more the killings stacked up on the blog, the more absurd the old media criteria for selecting one homicide over another seemed. Thirteen-year-old boys nearly always made the headlines of The Times' print edition, but 14-year-olds were a tossup. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds were more likely to make the cut if they were girls.

One of those happened in May. Two Latino men, each 23, were working on a gutter across the street from Elizabeth Street Elementary School in Cudahy while classes were in session.

And that's one of the most horrible realities of the media today. We're so thinly spread and understaffed, even at a huge place like the Times, lives met with tragic, violent ends don't even make the paper. There's just too many of them to go around, even in a relatively safe year like '07. I'm glad that Ms. Leovy and Mr. Vives, as well as our own team, are there to try to tell those stories. I'd just as soon never write about another murder trial or rotten crime, but while they're still here-- and they always will be-- we've got to keep reminding people why they matter.