Which deaths count? Debating homicide coverage amidst newsroom scarcity

Abstract

Past research documents disparities in which homicides receive news coverage and how victims are portrayed, yet the organizational processes producing these patterns remain understudied. This paper asks how crime journalists navigate homicide coverage under resource scarcity—and why widely voiced concerns about the racialized consequences of coverage fail to resolve disagreements about equitable practice. Drawing on interviews with 58 crime journalists across 40 local newsrooms, I find that homicide coverage generated the most sustained professional disagreements in the data. Journalists agreed homicides were newsworthy and shared a vision for ideal coverage, but resource constraints often made it unrealizable. Participants invoked competing moral frameworks organized around two concerns: that selective coverage risks symbolic annihilation of primarily Black victims whose deaths go publicly unacknowledged, and that universal episodic coverage risks territorial stigmatization of communities where violence is concentrated. Because scarcity forecloses the coverage that would avoid both harms, it transforms professional discretion into a choice among ethically unsatisfactory alternatives. Some journalists responded by abdicating discretion entirely, endorsing universal coverage because they distrusted selective judgment. These findings illuminate why the coverage patterns that criminologists have identified as harmful persist even among practitioners who recognize and contest them.