Say cheese
“If you don’t want it in the paper then don’t let it happen,” J. Martin Ward emails me about having your kisser featured in his mugshot rag Busted in Austin.
Ward and his business partner, “Kyle,” started publishing the weekly 16-page paper–which sells for $1 at convenience stores and gas stations–six months ago. In that time, circulation has grown from 1,000 to upwards of 10,000. (Print is dead.) “We are in 160 locations and growing every week,” Ward writes. (Print is dead.) “Plans to expand [into other cities] are in the works,” he adds. (Did I mention print is dead?)
Part of the appeal is in the presentation. In lieu of actual stories–save for the occasional blotter–Busted editorializes through its categorization of certain criminals by, say, their disheveled hairdos (think Nick Nolte), or through games like “Whodunnit?,” wherein readers match the criminal with the crime.
Why none of the countless newspaper publishers out there who are desperately brainstorming ways to monetize their product haven’t stumbled onto this concept–as a pullout or online component, perhaps–is just a little bit curious.
Anyway, you’re probably wondering how publishing mugshots is even legal. Well, mugshots are public records. Any crime is game. DWI. Assault with a deadly weapon. Theft by check. Prostitution. Terroristic threat of a household. Speeding. Sexual assault of a child. Failure to stop and give aid. Even murder. These are just some of the offenses allegedly perpetrated by the characters in Busted.
“The face of crime is not homogeneous,” Ward writes. “You may see your neighbor, someone you went to school with, a co-worker, your boss, maybe even yourself in Busted.”
Fair enough. But has anyone called out the paper, or sought retribution against it for publicizing what they consider a private matter?
“We strive to hear the voice of dissent and publish our hate mail on a regular basis,” Ward writes. “We just don’t get a lot of it. Most correspondence is overwhelmingly positive.”
It is, after all, hard to argue with the results of Ward’s Dexter-like machinations.
“By issue 18, our paper had directly led to the capture of three absconding sex offenders,” he writes. “Two of them had been on the run for more than six years.”
