As we reported yesterday, the LAT Homicide Blog is on hiatus as of November 13th.

And their readers are pissed.

We were under the impression that this blog – particularly this one – would be a group effort. That staffers would all pitch in to make sure that all homicides were covered in some capacity.

An LAT staffer sent us this note, “Well, Jill [Jill Leovy] is on book leave and Ruben [Ruben Vives] is a Metpro, but I thought we were still doing it with everyone chipping in.”

Guess not.

Is the LAT homicide blog important?
( surveys)

Jill Leovy drops FBLA a note to pimp the following:

“Starting today, the Los Angeles Times begins a new effort to report all Los Angeles County homicides weekly. L.A. County is one of the nation’s most violent locales, and in a typical year the paper covers fewer than 10% of all homicides. Now, though, we will report all of them.”

All of them? Not just the pretty, young, white, female ones? It’s an interesting experiment, but a damn grim one. We worry about Jill. We know she’s a veteran crime reporter, but we wonder how long it will take before even she burns out on sheer number of young, young, young people who die needlessly every week.

[UPDATE: Jill responds to our concerns for her mental health and well-being: "We shall see on the burnout issue. It's a lot of work. Yes, the catastrophes are staggering individually, but I think I don't find homicide depressing because I am optimist about it. Anyway, I've been on homicide five years now and I haven't burnt out yet. I'm actually so excited to see this finally happen--I've been hoping for it for a long time.]