Can Mugshots Save the Newspaper Industry?

There's something missing in Denver this week. For the first time in 150 years, the Rocky Mountain News no longer exists. It's sad to see such a vibrant source of community information and perspective fade away, but it doesn't have to be this way. Newspapers are an old medium, and most of them have struggled famously to adapt to the web. There is plenty of innovation yet to come from newspaper websites, and expanded crime coverage - including a new form of the traditional police blotter - is on the horizon.

For better or worse, we're a culture obsessed with crime. We watch CSI and Law and Order all day, everyday. The TV news adage - "if it bleeds, it leads" still rules the airwaves. If the public wants more sensational crime coverage, if we demand mug shots and police video and scans of original police reports - online news sources should give them to us. We're paying the bills.

Many leading thinkers on the future of news are saying that ultra-local is the next step for online news. When it comes to  crime coverage, I take this to mean crime maps, blotters with mug shots, police reports searchable by the block - the kind of rich information that lets savvy web users dig into stories as much (or as little) as they want. The web also opens opportunities for real-time coverage - like tweeting a trial from the courtroom. This kind of new thinking can bring in new readers and bring readers back to newspaper websites dozens of times a day.

Some news sites have begun to give readers what they want in the form of real-time crime maps. The Baltimore Sun provides a murder map on its site. If there was one of these for Brooklyn, I'd check it every day, or get email alerts when there's a murder within a mile of my house. Violent crime is a fascinating thing, and if it brings visitors to your website, online news sources should take advantage of it. Would newspapers that take this route be capitalizing on crime? Yes. TV news has done this for years. They would also be making smart use of the opportunities provided by the web and using crime coverage to pay the bills for investigative reporting, arts coverage, human interest stories and the like.

The New York Post is not a paper that shies away from sensational news or one that can claim it skips the gore out of some dedication to decorum. Yet their online police blotter looks it leapt straight from the 1970s to the web. Are they missing an opportunity? A story last week in the New York Times bemoaned the "dying art of the crime blotter." Crime blotters should be thriving in this online age. It takes a lot of reporter time to sort through police reports and write a blotter (I know, I've done it). So tweet the blotter. Or scan the police reports and upload them whole.

The inherent measurability of online advertising and the web's 'culture of free' have been serious hurdles to overcome. Mug shots and scanned police reports aren't going to single-handedly save the industry. But to survive on the web, newspapers will need to question taboos against sensational crime coverage and reinvent every section of the traditional news. It's time for a 21st century police blotter.