David J. Krajicek
The Blues Maneuver


A Life of Crime

I spent most of my early professional life as a newspaper police reporter. I still write about crime, but most of my stories are longer features rather than the murder of the moment, a la Johnny Deadline.

A few years back, I cofounded with my colleague Ted Gest a national organization of police reporters, Criminal Justice Journalists. You can check out the website at the link below.

CJJ has an active discussion list for reporters, and Ted and I publish a daily news digest of crime policy stories drawn from publications across the country. Subscription information about Crime & Justice News is available at the CJJ site.




Under a Ford Foundation grant, I wrote web-published primers on covering crime and journalism ethics. Here are the links:



The Poynter Institute, a journalism-training organization based in Florida, offers a self-directed web course in crime reporting, based on my work. Here's the link:


My Bio

First things first: My last name is pronounced CRY-check.

I am a writer, newspaper columnist, author and former journalism professor. In my spare time, I sing and play trombone in a busy blues/swing/oldies band based in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. (Click the "My Band" link for more details.)

I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. I moved to New York City in the mid-1980s and now live in the Catskill Mountain hamlet of Red Falls, New York.

I have an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University. I spent nearly 15 years as a newspaper reporter in the Midwest and New York City. In 1991, I joined the faculty at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. I returned to writing full time in 1998.

I am a special correspondent for the New York Daily News, for which I write The Justice Story, a long-running Sunday crime feature. I am a correspondent with Court TV's Crime Library, to which I contribute feature stories about noteworthy crimes.

I've published nonfiction stories in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Manchester (U.K.) Guardian and Mother Jones.

I am the author of a nonfiction book, Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze, and Celebrities, published by Columbia University Press. (Click on the Book link for more information.)

In recent years I've turned to writing fiction, spurred in part by an arts fellowship at a mountaintop writer's retreat in 2001. My first published piece, a short story entitled Sutphin Blvd., was included in a 2004 anthology of 13 stories published by Midnight Mind Press in New York. In 2005, another of my short stories, Bluefish, was selected for performance by Literally Speaking, an Albany, N.Y., program similar to NPR's "Selected Shorts" program.

I'm a busy writer, but I am also an inveterate pursuer of hobbies. My band, the Blues Maneuver, plays about 50 gigs a year. I also enjoy golfing, bird-hunting, downhill skiing and fly-fishing.




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