The Courts Beat Nate Gartrell flipped through a fat stack of pages. “I’m basically just looking for homicides,” he said. Every week, Gartrell, a thirty-one-year-old reporter for the East Bay Times, visits the records office of the Contra Costa County criminal courthouse in Northern California, where a young clerk greets him with a smile and two sets of documents. One lists all the defendants scheduled to appear in the coming days; the other contains police reports detailing recent arrests. In late October, the schedule alone was a hundred and sixty pages long—nearly five hundred defendants. There were always more stories in the pile than Gartrell could cover, but he hated the thought of missing something important. So he scanned every sheet, tracing his index finger along each name and criminal charge, snapping a photo on his phone whenever a detail caught his eye.