I am a writer and editor specializing in legal affairs journalism.

During most of my 30-year career I have covered cops and courts, drugs and violent crime, legal policy, and a variety of business-and-law topics. Most of those years I was an editor. Since 2004, I have done some freelancing, in my off-hours when I wasn’t teaching (go here for more details). I left teaching in summer 2012 to freelance full time, both as a writer and editor, from my home in upstate New York.

In addition to magazine freelance, I’ve written an e-book, selected by Amazon as a Kindle Single and titled God’s Nobodies, based on my feature article in O, The Oprah Magazine. I’m a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors; Investigative Reporters and Editors; and Criminal Justice Journalists.

On this site, I:

• Blog about the sorts of writing I admire and on the issues I write about and care about. Here’s the inaugural post explaining the genesis of this and a later post where I tried to articulate key principles. In a nutshell: celebrating the journalism that educates and engages readers on the realities of crime, and on what it means to be “smart on crime” rather than just “tough on crime.”
• Blog about my new projects.
• Outline the editing and coaching services I can provide.
• Provide samples of my work.
• Outline my professional bio and provide my CV.
• Link to other sites I produce or follow.
• Give a glimpse of my life in New York’s Finger Lakes.
• List my contact info.

In 2006, I created LawBeat to blog about legal reporting as a way of hooking my students on legal affairs journalism (alas, that site and legal-reporting program are gone). Over its three-year run, the site gained a following among legal-affairs journalists based on its daily critiques of good and bad reporting about the law. I do not intend this latest blog to be Son of LawBeat (though that has a nice ring to it). But now and then I will dabble in legal-journalism critiques. Mostly I intend to use this site to track developments in the policy areas I care about — namely victim rights, restorative justice, prisons and sentencing, and the intersection of law, politics, and the media — and to point to examples of fine narrative journalism that illuminates those issues.

All material I produced on this site © 2013, Mark Obbie, LLC.