New York Times bestselling author Jill Leovy, who pioneered an important form of journalism by creating ‘The Homicide Report’ for the Los Angeles Times, has joined the USC Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership & Policy as a Senior Fellow. “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America” (Speigel&Grau/Random House 2015) was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and was awarded the California Book Award for nonfiction.
As an LA Times reporter, Leovy created ‘The Homicide Report,’ an online multimedia on latimes.com where she chronicled more than 800 murders in Los Angeles County in a single year, 2007. The Homicide Report, which was the subject of coverage by NPR’s All Things Considered, NBC Nightly News, and CNN, was emulated by newspapers around in the country.
“Leovy is a great reporter and story teller who has pioneered the use of multi-media to increase the power and importance of the press,” CCLP Director Geoffrey Cowan said in announcing her appointment. “We are thrilled to have her connected with CCLP and the Annenberg School.”
The Washington Post review of Ghettoside said that “Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy has spent more than a decade in her city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, with killers who are more scared and embarrassed than they are brutal; mothers who do everything they can but still lose their kids to the streets anyway; neighborhoods wracked by violence, where nearly everybody is a good person trying to do right; dead and wounded who are no more drug dealers and gang members than they are saints; adolescent hookers with more courage than most cops; cops who see their responsibility to protect the neighborhood as a holy mission. She brings them all to life with grace and artistry, and controlled — but bone-deep — outrage in her new book, Ghettoside.
Leovy also served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing dispatches from Ground Zero after Sept. 11, 2001, as a foreign correspondent in Mexico from Mexico City in 2001, and as a higher education reporter, producing stories on inequities in college financial aid that prompted legislative reforms. Her work also has appeared in the The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal, the (London) Telegraph, Slate, The Marshall Project, and the academic book “Post-Ghetto: Re-imagining South Los Angeles” (UC/Huntington Library Press, 2012).