A fascinating  journalism project, Homicide Watch D.C. tracks every homicide in one part of America. It’s editor, Laura Norton Amico, started it after moving to D.C. in 2009, and since then it’s built a following, a reputation and even a community of people wishing to pay their respects to their lost friends and relatives.

There’s a lot to take from Laura’s reporting style, taking the internet by it’s ears and shaking out any trace of a story. Read on to find out what inspired her to spend her time voluntarily reporting on deaths, how she finds stories that would otherwise go unreported, and what you can do to get the best out of the social networks.

You do allude to your reasons for setting up Homicide Watch D.C. in the about section of the website, but what was it that made you decide ‘today, as a labour of love, I’m going to start tracking the story of every homicide in D.C.’?

It has become a labour of love, you might say, but the mission of the site and the way we manifest that is born from traditional reporting and boring old curiosity.

I wanted to know what was happening with cases in my neighborhood and in my new city. (I moved to DC in Sept. 2009 from California, when my husband took a job here.) I wanted to know why Oscar Fuentes was killed at his home less than a half mile from mine. I wanted to know who was responsible for killing Sean Robinson on my block one night while I watched T.V. Why were this boy (Fuentes) and this young man (Robinson) in danger? Once I started looking into those cases and others, I realized just how much need there was for a resource that addressed these questions.

Initially the idea was very simple; Homicide Watch would simply be an accounting for all the cases. Now it’s much more than that. It’s a journalism resource number one, allowing us to ask and answer hundreds of questions about DC homicides. But it’s also a community resource. In working on the site, I saw that families of homicide victims were using Facebook profiles and online obituaries to “talk” to the victims sometimes even years after the death, updating them on recent news and events and such. It was this huge undercurrent of not grief, exactly, but of connection, running through the city. But unless you were directly connected to the families you had no way of knowing that it existed or how deeply these crimes are felt. So part of the project became creating a space for people to share their experiences and say publicly “I hurt and this is how I hurt.” I hope that having those conversations openly allows us to have a better conversation about violent crimes and their affects on our city, and on our lives as residents here.

How willing were the police and other organisations to provide details to you in the early stages?

I introduced myself when I launched the project, but got the feeling that no one really knew what to make of it. Who was I? A journalist? What were my credentials? If no one was paying me, was I legit? A blogger? What’s my agenda?

I still feel like a spend a lot of time trying to prove myself, but that I’m getting more and more recognition and help from the police and other organizations.

But the reality though is that the vast majority of my reporting is social media shoe-leather, not phone calls to cops or attorneys. Often I’ll see a Tweet to the effect of “Lots of police cars on Georgia Ave. Anyone know what’s up?” In my traditional newsroom, I would pick up my phone and hit the speed dial number for the police department’s public information officer and say “hey, what’s going on on Georgia Ave?” Now I hit the search engines. Usually I’ll be able to find out what’s going on from someone tweeting at the scene very quickly. Because my work is so focused, I don’t want to waste the time of the person on the other end of the line if I can find out easily enough on my own if I’m interested in what’s going on or not.

I have carried over some of my old tools, though. If I see some crime investigation mentioned on Twitter, I’ll turn on my police scanner and listen in to determine if it’s anything that I’d need to cover.

Has that changed as the community has built around Homicide Watch D.C.?

Since we’ve launched and gotten some very positive feedback, more and more people and organizations are certainly more willing to help. It was about two months ago where I felt like I had hit a critical mass of people who knew about the site, understood what we were trying to do, and felt like they could be a part of it. There are still some organizations that I haven’t been able to work with, but I think that given time, they’ll understand more of what I do. I recently started getting my first news “tips” from authoritative sources which was an exciting moment. It was like, “ok, people are starting to understand what I’m doing and what this is and that this isn’t just some weird death blog.”

You mention in an interview with Niemen Journalism Lab that you discovered D.C. officials put out a ‘surprising’ amount of information about homicides, if you’re willing to hunt it down. What’s your advice for hunting down that info?

The key in D.C. was to to find where everything was. I defined the site pretty early on as “anything a reporter would have in her notebook, in a folder, or on her desk when covering a case,” I made a comprehensive list of what all that stuff was then researched how to find it. It took some legwork.

I would say, take the time to consider not only what you’re looking for, but what questions you have, before starting your search. Having a question might lead you not only to a good document to use for a story, but to a whole resource to use on other stories. It’s also been important for us to publish all the primary source documents that we can. I can get down to the courthouse, find a criminal complaint and print it because that’s my job. Other people have other jobs and can’t get away during the day. I think that that same complaint should be accesible to them, too, so I put it all in an online library. The documents library is one of the most popular pages on the site. There’s a lot of interest out there for these types of primary sources and it’s worth taking the time to find them and publish them. And like any reporter, if I don’t know where to get something, I just ask.

Your example of reporting from analytics is a great example for anyone looking to find new routes to a story. Any further tips for people looking to get the most from social media as a reporting tool?

Reporting from analytics is pretty darn cool and I’ve been playing with it for a while now. I also recently had another search that was out of the blue- I can’t remember the person’s name that was being searched. When I finally did track down the case, I realized that we were about a week away from the 10 year anniversary of the homicide. That just shows me that even with cold cases, these crimes are still remembered and people still want information and they still want to connect.

Because Homicide Watch is so focused, and because our geography is pretty simple (D.C. is just one city, one police department investigating homicides, etc), analytics have been a great tool. But I also use a lot of well-crafted searches, including both daily internet searches for terms like “RIP” “tears SMH” “killed” “shot” “police” etc, and Google alerts for similar terms. It’s just like making your daily checks from your newsroom on your beat. Seventy or eighty percent of the time there’s nothing to report. But every so often there is.

Most importantly, get to know the words people use to talk about what you’re reporting on and find where they’re talking (play with the results near me function on Google). I was only able to key in to social media sources in DC once I learned how my sources talked… and typed. One of my best searches is “RIP visual,” because in DC “vigil” is often spelled “visual.” Once I learned that, my results for vigil searches multiplied exponentially.

Laura Norton Amico’s the Editor of Homicide Watch D.C., a website dedicated to telling the stories of every homicide in the district. You can find her on twitter @LauraNorton