My work history
From 2012 to 2024, I was a full-time freelance writer. My exclusive focus since 2014, when I started a yearlong Soros Justice Media Fellowship, was on criminal justice — specifically, victims of violent crime, violence prevention, policing, and punishment policies. On the Articles page you’ll find links to all of my work in recent years for publications including Longreads, The Atlantic, The Trace, Slate, The New York Times, Politico Magazine, Pacific Standard, TakePart, and many more. Though I have retired from this kind of work, I remain a contributing editor at Crime and Justice News, a project of a group where I serve on the board, Criminal Justice Journalists. In 2020 and 2021, I worked for Solutions Journalism Network as its criminal justice specialist.
Throughout my career, I covered legal affairs from many angles: cops and courts, drugs and violent crime, commercial litigation, legal policy, politics, and a variety of business-and-law topics. After working as a beat reporter at daily newspapers in Warren, Ohio, and Houston, Texas, I joined American Lawyer Media to run its Dallas-based weekly trade newspaper Texas Lawyer for several years. Next I ran ALM’s digital division in New York City (which later evolved into Law.com) before switching back to hands-on journalism, as executive editor of the company’s flagship magazine, The American Lawyer. I left that job to teach magazine journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where during my eight years on the faculty I won a multi-year Carnegie Corporation grant to start a legal reporting program and co-founded the university’s Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media. I managed to report and write some in-depth magazine features during my teaching years, but finding the time for months-long reporting projects was a struggle. So I left the Newhouse School in 2012 to return to the reporting and writing work that attracted me to journalism in the first place.
I traveled throughout the U.S. to report on criminal justice stories. Home is New York’s Finger Lakes region, not far from where I was born and raised outside of Rochester, New York.
I earned my bachelor’s degree from St. John Fisher College in Rochester and master’s from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. I am a long-time member of Investigative Reporters and Editors.
Here is a PDF of my most recent CV.
All pages on this site © 2024, Mark Obbie, LLC