The terms criminology and criminologist are deployed within media discourse, but often in an incidental or trivial way, rather than on the subject of crime or criminal justice. The point of this research is not to castigate the media for its failure to understand crime and criminal justice, but to see how criminology itself is pictured. It is argued for the appropriateness of a new public criminology and suggests some ways forward. This article illustrates how sociology is viewed in the press. It then explores how criminology is viewed in the press before going on to discuss how criminology might be conducted in public given this and the debates around public sociology. It is intended to spark a debate around these issues and to encourage a greater engagement by criminologists with the media. This paper, in part, replicates work done on sociology and sociologists in the previous year by Gaber (2005). Both serious contributions by criminologists and mentions of criminology, favorable and unfavorable, are analyzed to provoke discussion within criminology and criminal justice studies about how the discipline is viewed by the print media. Notes, and references