Washington Post and CNN media commentator Howard Kurtz, another daily MediaNews addict, says, "I think the clever and sometimes sardonic way that Romenesko packages and presents his daily media download has a lot to do with the site's charm."

It's a colicky time for journalists, competitive types who used to obsess about prestige and prizes but now have to worry about "eyeballs" and "branding," not to speak of stock options -- watching others get them, or watching their own tank.

But if you're Jim Romenesko you can rise above it all, from a refreshing remove, because shortly after you founded your little part-time MediaGossip site, a dull but worthy journalism teaching-and-research institution based in St. Petersburg, Florida, called you up wondering if it might pay you a living wage to do your hobby full-time. Romenesko got that call from the Poynter Institute's online editor, Bill Mitchell, last August and flew down for a weekend interview because he didn't have any vacation days left at the Pioneer Press. By that Sunday, Mitchell had offered him $65,000, which topped Romenesko's newspaper salary. And Mitchell met Romenesko's only condition: that he would get to telecommute from a location of his choice, which happened to be Chicago, where there's no chance at all of running into Steve Brill. Romenesko went on Poynter's payroll last October, and the transition became complete when MediaGossip got the more respectable URL, MediaNews.org, on February 1.

When Romenesko made the Forbes "Power 100" list and the magazine cheekily listed his Internet earnings at "$0.06 million," the trade publication Media Central (a Website owned by Primedia, the parent company of New York Magazine) called to offer him a job at a better salary. Poynter, which has funding from the now-deceased founder of the St. Petersburg Times, who willed his stock in the paper to the institute, promptly counteroffered with $80,000. Which is not bad money at all in Evanston, Illinois. (Romenesko's studio apartment cost $52,000.)

His technical employment by Poynter notwithstanding, Romenesko still essentially works for himself. "He updates the site live," says Mitchell, "which is certainly an approach that's open to debate." Romenesko alerts the home office in St. Pete's after he's updated the site, and "occasionally we'll find a typo, but Jim is so careful that I'm completely comfortable with the way we're doing this." In the half-year Romenesko's been on Poynter's payroll, he says, the institute has never once censored him or asked him to remove or reword an item. (It's worth noting, though, that a New York Times editor once called Romenesko and asked him to take down a link to NewYorkMag.com, where an article by this magazine's media columnist, Michael Wolff, contained a line about Alex Kuczynski that the Timesman objected to; Romenesko declined to remove the link.)

"The highlight of the police thing was sitting next to Jeffrey Dahmer at his trial. Not getting excited made me realize it was time to move on."

It's an exceedingly solitary existence, and while he doesn't have a sunlit loft office in the Starrett-Lehigh Building and stock options to keep him motivated, Romenesko does have . . . coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. "Let's see," Romenesko says when I ask him to do the math. "Usually when I'm putting the page together, maybe four of five cups. And then at like 11:30, I go to Peet's and have maybe three more." Occasionally, he'll crash midafternoon -- "Every once in a while, you know, I'll, like at 4:30, knock off for an hour" -- but by 6 or 7 p.m., he's had ten to twelve cups.

Jim Romenesko is the kind of guy whose professional life -- all those years as a police reporter -- always seemed so all-consuming and weirdly fascinating that it never occurred to me to think that he might have any interest in, or time for, a personal life. In fact, I've never thought to ask until now.

Significant other? None to speak of, at least lately. Friends? Since he moved to Evanston from St. Paul only recently, "they're mostly from Milwaukee, mostly from the old days. I drive up to Milwaukee on the weekends and hang out there."

Hobbies? Leisure time? Much of it is spent scouting items for his other cult media product, the news-of-the-weird site ObscureStore.com, which Romenesko founded in January 1998 and still updates daily. (Sample headline: REPORT: SILICON VALLEY NANNIES CAN GET $80,000.) In the "Store" part, he sells old-school paper " 'zines" (remember 'zines?) like Angry Thoreauan, Jersey Beat, Temp Slave, and Teen Fag, which he keeps in neat piles in his studio's walk-in closet.

Okay, family? His dad, Merlin, was a school superintendent in his hometown of Walworth, Wisconsin, and his mom, Rosemary, was a homemaker -- Romenesko had nine brothers and sisters.

And all those siblings? What do they do?

"Well, let's see, one brother is a CFO for a company in Chicago," Romenesko says. "Um, most of 'em are accountants, actually. And one owns a hardware store."

What about those five sisters?

"Uh, they're mostly schoolteachers. One . . . two . . . four of them are schoolteachers, yeah," he says before crumbling into laughter, seeming to realize for the first time that all but one of his sisters are schoolteachers (the fifth is in marketing).

It's as if Romenesko had just been waiting all his life for the Internet to get invented: "The Walworth Public Library got the Sunday New York Times, which arrived on Wednesday, and I was always the only person who touched it or read it."

He studied journalism at Marquette University in Milwaukee, then went to work for the Milwaukee Journal, which had its Pulitzer Prize-winning heyday in the sixties and seventies. "Graduating and getting hired was like the greatest thing in the world," he says. "I mean, I just remember springing out of bed in the morning, anxious to go to work. I actually held two jobs when I was there. By day I was the suburban reporter, and by night I was a police reporter. They got around it by paying me per story for my suburban stories and paying per hour for the police job.

"I was a police reporter pretty young and saw this side of life that I never saw when I grew up. In Walworth, Wisconsin, probably the most riveting thing was a truck went the wrong way around the village square -- and this is the truth. The picture was in the paper," he says, laughing. "So that was my police-news experience. Then you're thrown into a situation where, you know, people are stabbed 55 times and you get to go to the morgue and look at the Polaroid snapshots -- in color because they're murder, black-and-white if it's an accidental death."

Milwaukee was a rough-and-tumble, heavily segregated, fading Rust Belt city with a (somewhat peculiar) population of just over 600,000 at the time. "I remember there were a lot of autoerotic misadventures. I remember the perky secretary at the morgue asking me if I could take seeing an autoerotic misadventure, and not knowing what it was at the time."

And your reaction?

"Um, pretty fascinated," he says, laughing. "It was a guy who had handcuffs around his genitals and his wrists. He was like mid-twenties. It was Case 258 -- it became a classic. Classic Case 258. He had a motorized barbecue skewer that would control the rope around his neck. And supposedly the skewer switch failed, and instead of loosening the rope it tightened it."

Romenesko had such a knack for sifting through the crime blotter and finding the stories that had a gruesome, irresistible quality -- a certain creative depravity, you might say -- that his legend in the newsroom quickly grew. "A lot of my little stories would end up on the AP wire and I'd see 'em in the Sunday New York Times -- the little one-'graph, two-'graph fillers."

Of course, not all the weird characters were strictly criminal. Take one of the coroners at the Milwaukee morgue: "We used to call her Young Frankenstein's daughter. She was a great source, but she was kind of a frightening character. She was collecting men's testicles at home and got busted for it."

Um, what?

"Yeah, after autopsies, she would collect men's testicles and would take them home."

One day, an acquaintance who took care of her dog while she was away found the testicles.

"I mean, there were jars of them. She claimed that she was doing experiments to see if the testes of drug users differed from non-drug users'," Romenesko says, almost hyperventilating with laughter. "But when they busted her, they pointed out that she didn't have a control group."