E-Mail This Article to a Friend Caught in the act (continued)

Q: How do you determine the balance of the harder news items and the celebrity and wacky stuff?

A: We don’t really have any formula. We’re a three-person operation: there’s myself; Andrew Goldberg, who’s our managing editor; and Joe Jesselli, who’s our reporter. It pretty much comes down to if one of us has some interest in it. I mean, certain things just jump out at you, obviously. Some things come in over the transom. People drop dimes and I make the call about whether it’s something we’re going to pursue. So we don’t have a formula; we kind of have always thought of the site as a small newspaper, magazine, tabloid, take your pick, and we have a fairly wide array of interests personally, so if it falls in there, one of us will probably think that it’s worth pursuing. We certainly don’t do every story that comes in. If it interests us and we think it’s newsy, we’ll chase it, as long as there’s going to be a document associated with it. That’s obviously the underpinning of everything we do. There are plenty of important stories out there that for us there may not be an inroad because there isn’t a document that exists or one we can obtain. We don’t do press releases and things like that as ways to get in; we try to get you something that’s more meaty than that.

Q: Have you ever had any regrets about posting something?

A: No. There hasn’t been anything that we’ve looked back at and said, oh gosh, we shouldn’t have done that, or taken documents down. We were an independent site before we were purchased by Court TV; we’re under the Court TV umbrella, but we operate very, very independently of them — we make every call of what goes on the site, what doesn’t go on the site. No one has any sort of editorial control over what we do. We bring the same sort of standards and judgments to what we publish on the Web as I did deciding what I would cover writing for the Voice. I think that people look at the Web as this kind of land of desperados who will publish anything whether it’s true or not, and I think to some degree you can find that. We don’t operate like that. We’re careful about stuff; we vet stories and documents the same way I would preparing a 4000-word piece for the Voice. I spent 15 or 16 years, the first chunk of my career, every Monday night I would talk to libel lawyers and go over every story I ever wrote for that paper, so I have an idea of the boundaries. I think we have pretty strong journalistic roots, and I think we bring the same care and caution in what we pursue and how we pursue it as I would for print.

Q: Is anyone or anything off-limits?

A: Yeah, I mean, we’re not interested in people’s sex lives. We’re not interested in outing people. We’re not interested in people’s medical records. We stay away from really gory crimes and crimes against children. You can go read that crap elsewhere; it’s not anything that’s ever interested us, and it’s not anything that we care to use our time, use the space on the site, to cover. We’re very careful about scrubbing documents for Social Security numbers and home addresses of famous people so that there’s not going to be a stalking problem or identity-theft thing. You just know it when it’s not something that we’re going to pursue. Usually there’s nothing that we’re sitting here going, "Should we use it or shouldn’t we use it?" It’s usually a fairly simple call for us. I make those calls. I don’t fret over too many things. There’s not anything where we put something up and it was like, "Oh my God, jeez, I lost my mind," and we have to yank it down. It’s never happened. And we’ve been doing it for seven and a half years now.

Q: How often do you get people asking you to take something off the site?

A: We will have people who will call and complain. Lawyers will call and complain about things. I think that sometimes if you don’t really know anything about our site and you’re some lawyer, you think you can pick up a telephone and scare off some dopey Web site. But we’ve dealt with lawyers like that for a long, long time. We’ve never taken anything down because a lawyer was upset because we got an internal memo or we got a copy of a legal settlement agreement that was sealed.

We did something about three months ago; there’s a big investigation that’s been going on for probably a couple years here in New York involving the rap-music industry, specifically the Murder Inc. rap label, Ja Rule, Irv Gotti. Anyway, we’ve been following that, and we got a document that was supposed to have been sealed, an FBI affidavit, and in it it had details of murders that were being investigated and people who were suspected of murders. There was information in it that included details on a person who had provided the FBI and the New York Police Department with information about these homicides. We were begged by the United States Attorney’s Office to protect this person’s identity, and in a very, very rare occasion, we self-censored a document so someone wasn’t going to get clipped. But your run-of-the-mill lawyer who represents a famous person, or Courtney Love who’s pissed off because we did something.... We did something a few months ago where we got a copy of a sealed settlement agreement in a case involving the Best Buy electronics chain and the cast of The Sopranos. It wasn’t the greatest story in the world, but you know, the lawyer’s calling up freaking out. We’re like, we know what we can publish and what we can’t publish, so we pretty much politely give them the brush-off, and they quickly understand that just because you yell and threaten ... you’re going to have to do something a little bit more serious than that, and we know that we’re in our rights to use it, and they know it too but they try the bluster route, and it doesn’t work on our end.