Feature

Satellite Dish

By the time Romenesko was 28, he had seen enough to compile Death Log, a self-published book subtitled A Police Reporter's Collection of Coroners' Reports on Some of the Most Unusual Deaths Ever. But Romenesko -- anticipating the Smoking Gun Website by over a decade -- also included a section called "Morgue Reports of the Stars," which reproduced the autopsy write-ups of everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Lenny Bruce to Sharon Tate and Freddie Prinze, which he got by filing Freedom of Information Act requests.

Ask Romenesko about what attracts him to all this stuff, and he really begins to sound almost frighteningly like the male version of Marge Gunderson, Frances McDormand's benevolent cop character in Fargo: "Oh, I have a minor in psychology, so I've always been kind of interested in motivations and mind-sets and so on and so forth."

So, five years at a newspaper and thirteen years at a magazine covering the heartland freak show.

"The highlight of the police thing was sitting next to Jeffrey Dahmer at his trial for three weeks," Romenesko says. He had a front-row seat that he shared with a Vanity Fair writer. "I remember thinking that I should be more excited about being there, because people were standing in line at three in the morning trying to get a seat. People, you know, just dying to get in there. Covering that and not getting excited kind of made me realize that it was time to move on."

The minute he got on the Internet, in 1990 -- Romenesko taught a course at a local college and taught himself unix so he could use the school's mainframe -- "I knew that that was where I wanted to be, that's what I wanted to do."

And, of course, it allowed him to come full circle, doing what amounts to an all-knowing, all-seeing version of his old Milwaukee Magazine "Pressroom Confidential" column.

The touching, almost anachronistic thing, really, is that Romenesko actually seems to care about journalists and journalism, which is the answer to everyone's obvious question: "What would make a guy read hundreds of articles about journalists every single day?"

"I think that the classic journalists are pleasantly eccentric, a lot of them. I mean, going back to the days of the Journal, I think of the oddballs who were in there" -- "in there," he says, as if it were some sort of asylum. "You know, the drama critic who was literally very obsessive and washed his hands every five minutes; you'd just, like, watch him go back and forth, back and forth. The near-deaf advice columnist who kept her phone in her desk drawer and it'd be ringing and ringing and people'd finally have to go take it out.

"And," he adds, "when you start talking to journalists, we all kind of seem to have a similar background in some respects. In high school, we weren't usually the real popular people. . . . Journalists, I think, are just smarter people, more interesting people, basically."

You thought the Manhattan media freak show was a shallow, callow world of shameless self-promoters? Guess again. Jim Romenesko is willing to overlook your personal trainer, Tina Brown, and your bespoke suits, Graydon Carter. Because Jim Romenesko knows that somewhere, deep inside, you're a smart high-school reject -- and he likes that about you.