Facing off

   We know there's another crime publication in town, but we've never paid much attention to it. It's priced at $1.50 (50 percent higher than ours), which is a real crime, because it carries no local mug shots. How do we know this? Because we pick up our mug shots every week at the Criminal Justice Center downtown, and the fine folks there tell us that our "rival" has not been there in months and months. And since that's the only source for the mugs of those who have just been busted...

   We won't name our "competitor" -- let's face it, anybody can sue anybody these days -- but we give it credit for hanging in there for so long, with its mugs from who-knows-where, its sloppy grammar and layout, its cheesy promos, its ill-advised selling price and its unpredictable publication schedule, and, above all, its, frankly, unethical promise to keep crime perpetrators out of its pages, for a fee.

   Besides the fact that there is zero -- repeat, zero -- chance of a Middle Tennessee perp showing up in the paper, there's the whole conflict-of-purpose issue.Isn't the justification for a crime publication to alert citizens to the presence of criminals in their midst? If these offenders are able to buy their way out of the spotlight, isn't the purpose compromised, or defeated?

   Just sayin'...