By Ella Hanley
Every week, Idaho Statesman criminal justice reporter Alex Brizee reviews a spreadsheet containing the names of roughly 90 people, each of them someone who has appeared in a Statesman crime story. It’s a process that ensures the Statesman only names suspects when there’s a clear plan to follow up on their story.
“It’s probably the most important thing I do because it keeps all of my cases up to date. Everyone gets some closure if we’re going to write about them,” she said.
In 2020, the Statesman shifted from episodic crime coverage to contextualized reporting – also called public safety journalism. This approach pairs individual crime stories with analysis of broader patterns and root causes, helping readers separate fact from fear. It also ensures newsrooms prioritize stories with public impact rather than on isolated incidents.
Not every murder is covered by state newsrooms and there are several reasons for this. Newsrooms often have limited resources and must prioritize stories with broad impact. But in Idaho, where crime rates are generally low, most homicides attract attention.
“A shooting isn’t happening on a daily basis here, so it becomes a little bit more relevant to write about,” Brizee said. The state recorded only 30 murders in 2024.
The Statesman maintains multiple spreadsheets tracking different crime trends, such as police shootings and pedestrian deaths. These databases, independent of police records, allow the newsroom to provide context, identify patterns and assess risk. Stories that mainly satisfy curiosity or provoke fear are either reshaped or dropped.
“Context is really important. It serves a purpose,” Brizee said. “Having that information on hand, versus trying to scramble to get it in the midst of a breaking news event, really adds to reporting.”
In 2022, the Statesman participated in a Poynter Institute training on crime coverage, learning to pair individual stories with context and explore systemic factors. Kelly McBride, Poynter’s senior vice president, compared crime reporting to weather coverage: “With weather, there’s context and explanation. What if you took that approach to crime?”
McBride stressed that isolated crime coverage can distort public perception and overstate risk. In fact, the Pew Research Center reports that Americans believe crime has been rising in the United States for the past three decades, despite a dramatic decrease since 1993.
To move beyond harmful crime coverage, McBride said journalists should pair individual stories with context that helps audiences understand patterns and causes, seek sources beyond police reports, and explain systemic factors in ways general audiences can grasp.
“The intention of the journalist has to be to help the audience understand the big picture of public safety better, even if you’re just telling a small piece of that big picture,” McBride said.
The Poynter training, completed in the summer of 2022, proved useful during the high-profile quadruple homicide in Moscow, Idaho, where Bryan Kohberger murdered four University of Idaho students. While the training guided the newsroom, the case’s notoriety made it an outlier: some coverage decisions departed from usual standards even as they worked to uphold ethical reporting.
“In some ways, it was like the exception. We did run a mug shot of Kohberger initially even though we stopped running mug shots years before,” Brizee said. “This case was so notorious. This person was someone the police had been searching for like seven weeks.”
“Obviously, there wasn’t a question of, ‘Are we going to name him?’ Of course we were going to name him,”she added. “And of course we were following the case to the end.”
The Statesman published hundreds of articles on the case — more than on any other crime story — tracking hearings and updates over several years. Brizee said the newsroom’s existing crime coverage standards helped fuel ongoing conversations about ethics during that time, reinforcing an approach that required editors to weigh each decision for its public value.
When she became more deeply involved in the case last year, Brizee said she focused on explanatory reporting and expert analysis. Ahead of Kohberger’s plea hearing, for example, she published a story explaining what the proceeding would entail. When his lead defense attorney later argued in court filings that Kohberger’s autism diagnosis should exempt him from the death penalty, Brizee turned to experts to contextualize the claim. The approach helped readers understand the legal process and its implications without sensationalizing the crime itself.
“What was interesting about this case is the way that these really normal court procedures became so high-profile and questioned. Everyone has an opinion on these things,” Brizee said, adding that she worked to help people understand the inner workings of criminal procedure and the trial process. “And they actually read it, because everyone was reading Kohberger stuff,” she added.
For newsrooms seeking to reform their crime coverage, Brizee says maintaining a spreadsheet is an essential first step. She considers this meticulous tracking the most important part of her work because it ensures the Statesman tracks every named defendant through to an outcome, preventing “hit-and-run” reporting that leaves people frozen at the moment of arrest.
Brizee keeps a quote taped to her desk: “A good day for a crime reporter is by definition someone else’s worst day.” It’s a small line, but it anchors the reforms she’s pushed for and reminds her that behind every story is a real person whose life can be profoundly affected by how it is reported.
Ella Hanley is a 2025-26 fellow at the Center for Journalism Ethics and an undergraduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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