ASK ANY publisher, podcaster, or producer, and they’ll tell you the same thing: We’re in a golden era for true crime, with award-winning actors, directors, and journalists eager to mine every community’s darkest moments. But many of the incidents detailed in glossy documentaries and slick podcasts were first exposed by local reporters on the crime beat, often via bite-sized items penned on the fly. Those journalists are responsible for the grains of sand that high-profile, star-studded true crime pearls are formed around. Until recently, eastside resident Ryan Martin was one of them.
Martin was a reporter with The Indianapolis Star for around seven years, where his work ranged from brief, breaking news items to a Pulitzer Prize–winning group investigation into how law enforcement agencies use—and often misuse—trained dogs. That latter style of crime reporting can be the most professionally satisfying, Martin admits. But it’s also expensive for news companies to produce and is rarely profitable. “There were all these things that would happen on the police beat that I would always want more time with,” Martin says. “That’s not the nature of the beat, really.”
Instead, daily newspapers and broadcast TV rely on short and immediate reports for their bread and butter. These are the stories you see shared on Nextdoor or Facebook with amateur commentary, speculation, and infighting threaded beneath. Though those stories are often superficial, Martin says they still serve an important function. “If you’re invested in a neighborhood, you really want to know what’s happening there,” Martin says. “People have a right to know about threats to their own livelihood in their own neighborhoods.”
Ideally, those breaking news items can improve society by creating a better-informed citizenry. “If there’s a bunch of police on your street, you want to know why they were there,” Martin says. “Otherwise, people will fill the blanks in with things that may be even worse.”
But for a long time, daily crime coverage might have twisted how we see the world. As long as news organizations have existed, they’ve traded in sensational headlines and fearmongering to attract readers. “As we’ve learned over time, it can be very damaging if you cover crime in a certain way,” Martin says. “It can stereotype people. It can tokenize people. It can create misperceptions about entire neighborhoods.”
“There was a time you’d just go and pull the court record, then you’d find something egregious to play up, slap a mug shot on it, write a headline that is tantalizing, and then call it a day,” Martin says.
“It’s embarrassing to think about the lack of care, the lack of empathy, the lack of understanding of how everybody involved in those stories ended up in that situation,” he says of the professional expectations that he (as well as most other crime writers) worked under.
Things are improving, however. Many outlets have repositioned their crime reporting since the social justice uprising of 2020, increasing efforts to center those who experienced the crime (as opposed to the perpetrators), cutting use of mug shots, and relying less on a single narrative provided by law-enforcement.
Last year, Martin left the Star for a role as deputy managing editor at Mirror Indy, a community-based newsroom. The outlet, which can be found at mirrorindy.org, made a conscious decision against covering the day-to-day crime on which Martin built his career.
“We don’t want to replicate what other newsrooms are doing. We want to add to the local journalism that’s being produced,” Martin says. “We did a lot of research, interviews, and surveys and heard time and time again that there’s plenty of sports and crime news in Indy. So when we got ready to launch, we decided not to do either. Readers have ample opportunity to find that somewhere else.”
