If newspapers are going to build circulation again, they'll need to show more photos, and few things are more interesting to look at than photos of criminals (above).
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Dramatic crime photos like the one above are better suited for magazines than newspapers. Newspaper readers prefer something more sedate. They like to see unposed criminal faces that they can study at leisure. Maybe that's because most people want to confirm their belief that they're good at judging people by their appearance.
I like crime portraits that beg to tell a story. Take the one above, for example. The woman looks intelligent. In another life she might have been the District Attorney rather than a prisoner in the dock. How did she end up in jail? Did a man lead her astray? Was she born bad? Is she actually evil? You want to know more about her, and that sells newspapers.
Some criminals (above) look bad through and through. You need pictures of those people, too. Maybe seeing them caught and held up for public display satisfies the part of us that yearns to grab a torch and a pitchfork and storm Frankenstein's castle.
Most newspaper photos are served up in bad resolution, but that's an asset, not a liability. Marshal McLuhan said that old black and white TV was more emotionally involving than modern color TV. The mental effort we were forced to exert in order to construct images from the old TV scan lines compelled us to get involved with what we were seeing. Well, dot printing has the same effect.
Hazy newspaper reproduction forces us to become involved with the pictures. Newspapers are actually a perfect medium for a certain type of picture. By "certain type" I mean that the subject matter has to be at least potentially interesting, something which current newspaper photos never are.
