Reporting From New York.com

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Please E-mail John Powers: ReportingfromNY@Gmail.com

An accomplished Web-Journalist, John Powers was one of the first on-line reporters to be sanctioned by the traditional media as a reliable source of news.

Check Out John Powers and his Action Report, in Kevin McMurray’s book, “Desire Turned Deadly.”

 

 How I got my Start in Blogging

Now, with a single Tweet, a person’s blog entry gets vacuumed up by Google-bots, and instantly proliferated throughout the Web. In the pre-Twitter era of the Internet, way back in 2005, a blog entry remained static, so drawing readers required some imaginative techniques.

With that in mind, I devised a strategy to help promote my site by micro-targeting the “Comments” section of social networking sites owned by people accused of committing serious crimes, and pasting inbound links into their time-line back to, “The John Powers Action Report.

Lagging slightly behind the blogosphere in its discovery that criminals kept blogs too, when the three major cable news networks shifted their focus on this new dimension in crime reporting, they created a surge of publicity, giving unsavory blogs like “The Fifth Nail,” by convicted killer  Joseph Duncan  unprecedented, widespread media coverage.

Anticipating this trend, mere bloggers like myself were evolving into a new species called Internet Sleuths.

Sifting and mining through hundreds of crime stories reported in the media, alert CrimeBloggers like Dan Riehl and Steve Huff combed the Internet, unearthing the web presence of suspects associated with high profile criminal cases; it was the era of the “Electronic News Beat,” coming of age.

Arriving hours ahead of the hundreds of thousands of visitors being steered to these sites by the cable news networks, a backwards link to your own Website raised your profile as a credible Internet sleuth.

Competing with a dozen or so other like-minded bloggers, just being well informed wasn’t good enough. Identifying sweet spots in media trends coupled with rapid search skills were prerequisites. To operate, you needed a detective’s intuition, a carny’s shameless sense of self promotion, and  above all else, you just needed to be quick enough.    

I was quick enough the day David Ludwig murdered his girlfriend’s parents in November 2005.

Along with the healthy boost in traffic I trapped, I received an anonymous tip directing me to a link containing  Ludwig’s entire E-mail account.  When I went public with the information, Ludwig was still on the lam, and so began my 15 Links of Fame.

Subsequently, I made several television appearances on the topic of Ludwig, and several more providing commentary on other famous cases like, Rachelle Waterman’s blog heard ’round the world called, “My Crappy Life,” and the odyssey of Neil Entwistle, an Internet scam artist who escaped to England after murdering his own family.

Prior to my going public with the Ludwig E-mails, I shared them with Steve Huff: The Crime-Blog-Daddy of them all, who now blogs at The True Crime Report for Village Voice Media. As a result, Huff invited me to guest blog for him. Publishing my entries through a series of reports I dubbed, “Reporting from New York,” it was then that I got the idea for this site.

With years of training as a journalist, what set me apart from other crimebloggers, was my ability to provide real reporting. Ditching my pajamas for some shoe leather, I tracked down and confronted on-line predators, obtained and conducted interviews with people associated with high profile crimes, including exclusives with the daughter of former mob boss,  Carmine “Lilo” Galante, and the son of one of  the victims of Long Island’s most prolific serial killers, Joel Rifkin. Substantiating my reports with eyewitness accounts, I’ve visited actual crime scenes, in Manhattan, Queens and Long Island, giving fans of true crime the kind of first hand reporting crime blogging was lacking.

Now nearing my final year at the University of Stony Brook’s prestigious School of Journalism, I’ve decided to publish Reporting From New York.com in blog format, and return to politics; my original passion in reporting.

As a full time reporter for Newsday, I see many journalists considering this special province of Journalism (political reporting)-and John Powers possesses the tools that make the best ones great. He has an unusually acute sense of politics and the role that journalists play in shaping the political landscape. He is all but destined to become one of the the most revered voices in  American political discourse.

-Zachary  Dowdy

RFNY provides national news analysis from a New York State of Mind.

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Contact John Powers: ReportingfromNY@gmail.com