UPDATE: Homicide Watch has launched a Kickstarter to keep the site running.

Homicide Watch, the news start-up that covers Washington’s murders with Sisyphean endurance, is going on hiatus. The site’s wife-and-husband operators, Laura and Chris Amico, are headed to Harvard for 10 months on a Nieman journalism fellowship, and there’s no one to keep the site up in D.C.

And it may stay that way. In an interview on Nieman Journalism Lab, Laura Amico says she may want to join a larger outlet when her fellowship ends. A deal to license the site to a “local news organization” collapsed, according to Amico.

Amico also had some harsh words for Washington newspapers whose homicide coverage, she says, is hobbled by a ’90s-vintage drug-war mindset. The “criteria that newsrooms are using to determine what homicides are and are not important has not changed,” Amico told Journalism Lab. “There’s a divergence of news values and realities.”

Whatever happens to Homicide Watch, at least we still have bear-centric spin-off Grizzly Watch.

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