HOW CRIME COULD SAVE NEWSPAPERS

That's a real life crime scene above. This bathroom was the scene of a murder.... I don't know the particulars. If you're like me you won't be able to resist staring at it, maybe in the superstitious belief that a location can have a malevolent personality and can be a collaborator in violent crimes. Isn't that what Stephen King was getting at in "The Shining?" 

I covered up the gory part of the photo with scrap paper. That's because I want to demonstrate that even an empty room can be interesting if it's known to be the locale of a crime. Still pictures can be an amazingly effective medium for things like this. A newspaper might devote a whole 20% of a page to an empty crime scene photo like this.

  Newspapers are always looking for a way to stay relevant and one way to do that is to up their game by making their crime reporting more exciting. Big cities are plagued with crime and this is a way to turn a liability into an asset...well, sort of.

   

Newspapers can't compete with TV for breaking news, or with computers for quick summaries, but they're great for pictures people want to study, like the mugshots above. Readers like to linger on the faces of people in the news, even if those people are criminals. We're all interested in life's other side.

Newspapers also have the advantage that line drawings have more impact on pulp paper than on computer screens. I'm not sure why. Maybe the tactile grit of the paper has something to do with it. Maybe McLuhan's theory that imperfect definition increases viewer participation explains it.

I've long believed that newspapers should have an artist sketch what the police speculate happened at a crime scene. Of course the sketch only illustrates a first impression and may be made irrelevant by new facts as they emerge.

Lots of readers are amateur sleuths and they'd appreciate diagrams like the ones above.

Here's (above) a police shootout. No doubt the photographer risked his life to get the picture. Police should allow news photographers the freedom of movement necessary to get pictures like this.

Of course there's always the possibility that exciting crime reporting may inadvertently encourage wrongdoing. To counteract that the paper would generally show things from the point of view of the police. The worst kind of sociopathic career criminals would be treated in print as rats and predators.

Better crime reporting should be supplemented with daily photo essays emphasizing ordinary life in the big city. Here's an excerpt from a Life magazine essay in which a cameraman followed a doctor, a general practitioner, as he made his rounds during the day.

From a different essay here's (above) two women getting ready for a day at the beach. Good photographers can find a lot to shoot, even in surroundings as common as this one.