While no one can predict what the new year will bring, it will certainly see its share of strange news. As long as there are humans to make laws, there will be humans to break laws.
In the course of any year, newspapers get complaints about the stories they choose to publish.
Readers want more good news. Or they want more investigative pieces. They want more nation and world news, or less. They want more positive news stories about President Donald Trump. They want more negative news stories about President Donald Trump. On a regular basis, we are accused of being too conservative and too liberal.
They definitely want their puzzles to be formatted correctly and they like seeing friends' and neighbors' photos appear in regular community features.
Those are all things they say they want. But what they don't include on that list are the mugshots or crime blotter pieces that are a strong piece of our online publishing efforts. And yet those two things are consistently among the most popular items on our website and Facebook page.
We know this because when readers go to our online edition, their page views are recorded.
And so at the end of the year, we can track and list our 10 most popular crime blotter pieces over the course of the year, and reprint them online.
Some of them are funny, like the woman who told officers she used meth to stay awake. Or the man who hid a bag of heroin between his buttocks and refused to unclench them so officers could retrieve the drugs.
Some are tragic, like the woman who tried to solicit a deputy for sex on a very cold night. She was hoping, she said, to raise enough money for a hotel room.
Some are just gross, dealing with sexual battery and abuse of minors. Readers may be horrified by those stories, but they are drawn to them, too. In fact, the top three crime blotters for 2017 all had to do with sex crimes.
While no one can predict what the new year will bring, it will certainly see its share of strange news. As long as there are humans to make laws, there will be humans to break laws.
And those of us safely on the correct side of the law will continue to be intrigued by those who cross the line. — The Northwest Florida Daily News