Behold The Blotter.
What is it? A bazaar powered by oddballs, screwballs, and ballistic capers that pop off every day throughout Gotham’s five boroughs. Unlike the mainstream news gatherers in their cruise ship speeds and scopes — TB hunts for scoops in the crannies.
We don’t stop caring if the incident happens outside the posh Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The items spotlit here are fringe fare; way the hell off-the-grid. You likely won’t read them anywhere else. And the aim is to deliver proprietary material with punchy copy. That’s where TB’s tagline originates: under-the-radar riff raff.
The sole aim is to showcase some of the strangest moments of the day that received some kind of law enforcement business. It could be an innocuous U-Turn or an illicit car window tint that is a mere symptom to a messy misdemeanor or felony. Dope sellers, gangbangers, sewer mancover ninjas, skyscraper or bridge scalers, scrappy straphangers, bicyclists versus cabbies, bus drivers warring over right-of-ways, the whispers around criminal courts.
Also The Blotter’s curated daily visual (stills and video) finds become keepers. All of it is part of a perpy potpouri that is served up unstepped on. Straight from the brick.
Four-letter words are fair game. So too are five-syllable words i.e. narcotrafficker, pyromaniac, assassination, deleterious… ring-a-ding-ding-ding!
At the controls are sourced reporters with uncanny news noses.
My name is M.L. Nestel. And as the founder, I penned the blotter for years at The New York Post… before that paper played “Taps” and let it fade into the abyss. I also worked the notorious lobster trick — otherwise known as the overnight shift at The NY Daily News. My siren chasing from the boroughs, the tri-state, and all over the country as a national correspondent has armed me with quite the toolkit. A kinda hard knocks achievement as cum laude of crime from the University of Hard Knocks.
The methods deployed on every caper are old school with lots of proven shoe-leather grit. Not to mention the artistry by pro visionary Rob Weiss. We welcome your patronage, your ideas, tips, and witticisms.
Come for the reads, stay for the weirds.