Jill Leovy on 'Ghettoside,' world of homicide reporting

In "Ghettoside," reporter Jill Leovy dives into the world of homicide reporting - highlighting the disparities in who gets killed, and whose deaths get coverage in the media.

"Homicide had ravaged the country's black population for a century or more," she writes. "The raw agony that it visited on thousands of ordinary people was mostly invisible."

These are the killings that vanish without a trace, she says.

From The New York Times review:

Leovy, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, argues that as a nation we have grown far too accepting of our high rate of homicide -- all the yellow crime-scene tape and sidewalk candle memorials -- in large part because the media has paid too little attention. In response, she started a blog at her newspaper in late 2006 called The Homicide Report, in which she attempted to cover every murder in Los Angeles County in a single year. It was a radical idea -- at the time, her paper reported on only about 10 percent of homicides -- and also a near-impossible task: In a 2008 article, Leovy acknowledged that the report "has merely skimmed a problem whose true depths couldn't be conveyed."