Sometimes the best news stories are hidden in plain sight.

Official records and court documents often conceal stories that are enlightening, humorous or just bizarre.

These stories, in their original document form, have a home on The Smoking Gun, a quirky and irreverent Web site created by two New York reporters.

Creators William Bastone, 39, and Daniel Green, 37, bring a populist humor to their site, with its retro look and collection of paper records published on-line as they actually appear. Bastone and Green have made a hobby out of afflicting the comfortable by digging up gems like an alleged foul-mouthed assault by decoration diva Martha Stewart.

The site?s documents ?-- garnered from courthouses and Freedom of Information requests ?-- offer a clever, if sometimes titillating, view behind the scenes of American life. Where else could you read a lawsuit by a man who claimed his stripper gave him whiplash? Or, view Bill Gates? mug shot from a 1977 traffic infraction? There is more insightful stuff, too, like the come-on letters sent by various news outlets pleading for interviews with Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.

The Smoking Gunmen met at the Village Voice, where Bastone spent a dozen years as an investigative reporter covering the mafia and politics. Green interned there, later working a series of freelance and magazine gigs, including editing at Maxim and Ski magazine. They began The Smoking Gun in 1997, publishing part-time out of their homes and offices.

Along the way, they?ve scored a few impressive hits. They discovered that a bullet-perforated datebook carried by Malcom X the day he was assassinated had been stolen, eventually leading to the arrest of a New York court clerk who swiped it from the city archives. And, in February 2000, The Smoking Gun published a restraining order against Rick Rockwell, the contestant bachelor on Fox?s 'Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?' Bastone and Green tipped the mainstream press to their coup, resulting in front-page attention for the site and the story, and the cancellation of the short-lived TV show.

Court TV snapped up the scrappy site at the end of December, making Bastone and Green paid full-time editors with a dedicated office, armed with two new reporters and technical support. Documentary reporting from The Smoking Gun is linked from Court TV?s Web site and featured on the program 'Hollywood at Large.' The Smoking Gun, meanwhile, has claimed an impressive 4.5 million page views in the last couple of months.

'I think there will be some level of integration and cross-fertilization between courttv.com and The Smoking Gun,' said Galen Jones, a Court TV senior vice president. The new ownership will open opportunities for The Smoking Gun to grow, Jones said. 'I?m thinking they could create entirely new sites and new kinds of content areas within the site. It?s no longer a hobby site.'

Bastone and Green recently spoke with Online Journalism Review about their work, their past and their future.

After you guys met each other, what was the genesis of The Smoking Gun?

Danny Green: Often times we would come across these very interesting documents, court documents or police reports, FBI reports sometimes, that we found really cool. Sometimes they would add interesting or entertaining details to the news stories of the day. Sometimes they would be about something that happened in Hollywood, for example, 30 or 40 years ago. The way newspapers and magazines work, there?s just not enough space to include everything. And an editor certainly will not have much interest in an old FBI file that talked about Lou Costello?s collection of pornography. But we thought it was sort of cool and interesting.

And right about that time ? this was about five years ago when we got the idea and began working on it ? the Internet was just becoming quite big. And we thought, ?The Internet?s the perfect place to do this.? It won?t take the financial wherewithal that it would take to start a magazine, and we just thought the Internet is this new, kind of cool thing and let?s get involved somehow. And this is what we know and nobody else is doing it.

You were a bit contrarian, then.

Green: Yeah. But it didn?t bother us. We saw early on that a lot of people are going to be doing the same thing on the Internet. A lot of news sites were going to be writing about the same stories. Taking the same AP story, just cutting and pasting it onto their site.

Before being bought by Court TV, The Smoking Gun was essentially a hobby, right?

William Bastone: It was just something we were kicking around ideas about, doing something on the Net, and settled on just documents. First, we liked the idea that our hook was our Web site on the fast-paced Internet was going to be paper. It was something we knew, were comfortable with. Back then we didn?t know anything about bells and whistles, and Java, and all that other sort of stuff. We barely know any of that now. We know a teensy bit more. We basically stuck with what we knew and what we knew how to get: We knew how to get stories and we knew how to get documents.

How do you decide what to publish?

Green: We look at who the popular people are of the day, the popular news stories, and try to offer something that hasn?t been reported about them. We?re not going to do [a] fiftieth profile on Kate Hudson. Other people do that a lot better. We try to do something that nobody else does, and that is go to the court house and find the paper ? the interesting material or previously unreported material.

How do you get your documents?

Green: We spend a lot of time on the phone with court clerks, with police departments. We travel quite a bit. We?re willing to go across the country if there?s a document we have to travel across the country to get.

Is there anything you guys have ever retracted or taken down, or felt guilty about?

Bastone: No. We?re careful about things. We?re careful about things like social security numbers and identifying details. ... I know we?ve never put anything online that we?ve taken off. We bring to bear the same sort of filtering mechanism and care for what you do and do not cover that we did in our prior journalism. ... I have a pretty good sense about should or shouldn?t be the subject of stories, what is or isn?t fair game. It?s pretty much the same sort of ground rules to what we publish on the site. ... We?re not picking through people?s trash. We?re pretty much doing the same sort of stuff that every other reporter does in hunting down material. Except, you see the primary source material.

What?s your ultimate goal with the site? When you?re 70 or 80 years old and looking back on your wild youth, so to speak, what would hope to look back and say you have done with The Smoking Gun?

Green: I think I would like to be known as the site that, for it?s size, has broke more good stories than anybody else. For four years, it?s been two people doing it part time. We have a Web site designer and we have somebody who does our technical updates. But considering we had two people, I think we broke some terrific stories. And I would imagine we?re one of the top sites in the world as far as traffic per person, per staff member.

Bastone: What I want us to do is to grow the audience to be hopefully significantly bigger than it is and that our reputation continues to grow as a place where you can come and get stories and information that?s different or that?s a perspective that you don?t in other places. That the material is fresh and innovative. That we?re applying reporting techniques that I would use to go hunt down wise guys.

Would it be fair to characterize The Smoking Gun as a fringe site that has become increasingly mainstream?

Green: [Kindly challenging] I don?t know. What does fringe mean?

Sort of outside the usual channels of journalism.

Green: In that case, I hope we?re fringe. Most news organizations ? traditional Web sites, traditional magazines, newspapers ? have to go through certain channels to get their information. If you want to write about Tom Cruise, you have to go through Tom Cruise?s PR people. You have to set things up ahead of time and you have to, you know, kiss ass to get the Tom Cruise story. That?s not how we operate. We?ve never had to deal one single time with anyone?s PR person. I?ve never made a call to a PR person. We do things a different way. If that means fringe, then yeah, we are. I think people like it. I think people are tired of reading the same crap about the same people time and time again, and that?s why they like us.

Do you feel a responsibility to have a certain portion or percentage of 'hard news' like politics or crime, as opposed to celebrities?

Green: I feel a responsibility to follow the big stories of the day and write about what people are interested in. One of the things I?ve always liked about The Smoking Gun, and I get the sense that most people do, is it?s unexpected. One day you?ll get a story that?s on politics, and the next day you?ll get something about Hollywood, and the next day you?ll get something about American history, and the next day you?ll get some weird, small town crime. I think the fact that we keep people off balance, that it?s not just one thing or another, is a great benefit to us.

Bastone: We could probably decide tomorrow that we?re just going to go full-bore celebrity stuff and nothing were going to appear on the site without a name that the average surfer would know. We would probably see the site get bigger if we just decided to go the E! Online or Mr. Showbiz or full-blown gossip stuff. It?s interesting to some degree, but I don?t think that would hold our interest like a real mix of things.

With the acquisition by Court TV, you?re now getting paid for putting up a site you used to do for free? That?s got to be a good feeling.

Green: It?s a satisfying thing that it started as an idea over lunch and several years later to see a place like Court Television, a respected and large news organization, deem it worthy to put on their radar and invest resources in it. Yeah, that?s exciting.

Are you worried that corporate ownership is going to diminish, or has diminished, your independence?

Bastone: We haven?t done a thing different from the end of December until today. We still do exactly what we do. We haven?t heard boo about it and we don?t expect to. If we were putting documents on about the chairmen of Court TV, yeah I imagine they might want to have some say about it ? not that anyone would know who the guy is, to begin with ? but short of that we don?t expect to hear anything.

Are there some changes, technical or otherwise, on the way?

Green: I can?t really go into too much detail about it, but sometime in the next couple of months, we are going to be adding a video and audio component to the site. I guess the best way to describe it is, it?s a video and audio addition to what The Smoking Gun currently does with documents. It?s going to be terrific stuff you certainly will be unable to find anywhere else on the Internet, or on TV or radio.

Is there something you would like to put on the site that you?ve never been able to get your hands on?

Green: Yeah. I?d love to get George Steinbrenner?s mug shot [taken when he was indicted for illegal campaign contributions to President Richard Nixon]. I?ve thought about that over the years.