What does it mean in 2025 to have reverence for those who met a violent end? Believe it or not, some journalists may not want to over-dramatize the misfortune of a fellow person, or co-sign the blasé instincts that drove “if it bleeds, it leads” as a mantra in newspapers for a century-and-a-half. Turning the real pain and suffering of one individual into an imaginative feast of the senses for another comes with genuine consequences. 

For a community, those repercussions are desensitizing and socially unhealthy. For the actual writer, it can mean eventually having to live with a ghost army at one’s back. So why is it still happening? Even at this moment when more Americans than ever are fine-tuning their awareness through therapy, and when the younger generation is ever-dreadful of “emotional harm” and claims to value empathy above all things, the better angels we’re chasing seem to fly like wounded canaries in a wind tunnel — their bantam wings blurred and broken by the cacophonous roar of the algorithm. 

A news writer has no purpose if the news they’re sharing is not read; but today, even the most-mature and best-intentioned news consumer can feel their ability to focus being pried apart, their skill for concentration being drowned, the dignity within their ethical compass being smashed, by a blinking, scrolling, streaming flood of algorithmic discharge that cycles between their brain and their devices, one created with the express intention of suffocating the user’s critical thinking skills by never letting their mind rest on a coherent thought for too long. 

In this media whirlpool, with so many narcotizing pollutants floating around, how does any news writer break through without falling back on a celebration of deadly irony or coffin-closed schadenfreude?

It is a question that News & Review has been struggling with as it has handled the coverage of several crimes lately, and it’s been a personal dilemma I’ve wrestled with while finishing the final episode of a true crime podcast series called “Trace of the Devastation” this month.  

While the tensions around these questions are super-charged at the moment, in some respects, they go back to the earliest media in California. The best young writers to come out West after the Civil War, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, both relied on a carefree indifference to violent murder in the newspaper stories they published. Were these reporters destined to become giants of the written word just hardened and callous? Not really. The truth has more to do with our current conundrum in 2025: Media motivations. 

In 1860s California, Twain and Bierce had a habit of writing about specific true crime cases they could present as proof that life is a random, brutal, meaningless “theater of the absurd” (both men held that viewpoint for the rest of their lives). And while Twain and Bierce have been accused of being misanthropes, they were in fact very human when it came to their narrative choices. Bierce often wrote about real San Francisco killings in a way that would end on the punchline of a joke. However, when Bierce’s pen got to reliving the gore-spattered carnage that he himself survived as a union soldier in the Civil War, particularly in “A Little of Chickamauga” and “What I Saw at Shiloh,” his sneering wit and gallows humor were nowhere to be found. Similarly, Twain could scribble out news copy on bellicose gamblers and corrupt marshals being gunned down in mining camps and make them read like action-adventure tales, but when it came to the horrific death of his younger brother in a steamboat boiler explosion, all he would manage to write were letters about unending pain. This journalistic disconnect carried through into the 1960s and 1980s. Joan Didion gave us a spellbinding analysis of a real-life murder in California’s San Bernardino Valley, using it as a window into a cookie-cutter enclave of fakers and climbers with “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”; yet when Didion’s own niece, the actress Dominique Dunne, was murdered in a Hollywood domestic violence story, she held off on writing about it for decades—and only put down sentences on the topic as part of a massive exploration of grief called “A Year of Magical Thinking.”

No matter how practiced a writer is in their style, or how attuned they are to their persona, or how much they understand what an audience expects, he or she is still human. 

And so is their reader. 

But that’s what algorithmic anti-matter is starting to make us forget. 

“Trace of the Devastation” is an audio-documentary, released as a podcast series, that tries to confront the ghastly coincidence—or non-coincidence—of two separate pairs of duo serial killers operating in the same rural California ranching community of Calaveras County. I grew up in the middle of all that death, and in the case of one of those pairs of predators—Leonard Lake and Charles Ng—my family was directly connected to them. As I made the decision to release the final episode last week, I had to ask myself if dredging up all of that pain and loss again was really in the public interest. I knew that, when it came to simply revealing to a younger generation the unfathomable sadism that occurred in those hills, there had to be a reason beyond just putting a new or personal spin on the documentation. But for me, there was. It had to do with the culture of hopelessness that exists in the same ranching community today. And it had to do with all the ‘deaths of despair’ that continue to happen out in that isolated pocket of rural life. And it had to do with the fact that numbing, meth-fueled murders still go on there today, even decades after all the serial killers are dead or in prison. It had to do, in the end, with generational downstream trauma. It’s about the residue of nightmares.

So, is there a way to write about that, and record audio interviews about that, and produce a documentary about that, in a way where the algorithm doesn’t mandate a lack of humanity?

I’d like to think so, but trying to find a lesson in the story is everything.  

All six chapters of the podcast series “Trace of the Devastation” are now live on iTunes/Apple Podcast and Spotify.