Be thankful for advertising

Remember Black Friday 2010. It marks the beginning of the nation's recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-2010.

The mighty American consumer, taught the harsh lesson of credit-card debt, is back in the market, but this time buying with cash in the bank.

Online shoppers boosted online retailers' revenue by 16 percent on the Friday after Thanksgiving, according to the Associated Press, while long lines in the dark hours before dawn Friday proved before doors even opened that brick-and-mortar shops were going to have a good day.

Locally, you could tell that advertisers were back in force in the Denver Post.The Post has been selling the bottom of its Sunday front page for more than a year now, it seems. Since summer, the newspaper has sold the top-right corner of the page, labeled "Today's Daily Deal," to a variety of advertisers. And now the newspaper is selling off the bottom of page 2 as well, depriving readers of the interesting short items it has regularly showcased in that space but driving up ad-sales revenue that much more.

After all, what's a newspaper for? To share the news and serve the public interest? Not necessarily.

Newspapers survive today by selling space to advertisers; and the Great Recession for Newspapers, which began even before the nation's latest financial crisis, has proved unarguably that business survival is the ultimate goal of any newspaper, just as it is for any business.

In fact, newspapers, today, are not much different from any retailer; the ad sale is king, and not much will get in its way. Walmart, for example, long prided itself on not having to advertise in media because its low prices would lead consumers to its aisles simply by word-of-mouth. Today, however, Walmart is inserting ads in the Post like any other big-box seller.

I no longer argue with newspapers on that score. My profession as a journalist is dependent on the ad sale, and plenty of jobs collapsed when advertisers moved from newspapers to other venues to deliver their messages.

And if Today's Daily Deal for pole-dancing lessons, symphony performances and home-security packages do the trick (pun intended), then I'm all for using the deals to give working journalists some white space to fill with news.

And you can't argue with the results. If ads spur consumer spending, and consumer spending creates jobs and jobs create more spending, then an economy that is sputtering back to life is what every American, even the underemployed and unemployed, can genuinely be thankful for on this holiday weekend.

I am.

Keep the kids out of it

Call me an odd blogger, but what struck me most jarringly in the coverage of Sen. Michael Bennet's defense of himself over the Denver Public Schools pension refinancing, was his bringing kids into the political battle.

The Denver Post quoted Bennet as accusing the Andrew Romanoff campaign of "repeatedly trying to score points at the expense of kids...."

Bennet ought to be careful about such a kid-centered accusation while his own campaign is blatantly using his own children to win support for the appointed senator, their Dad.

A Bennet ad currently running on television has each of his three beautiful daughters saying something nice about their Dad's cleaning up of messes created by other politicians.

The mess their Dad has gotten himself into with a high-finance bond scheme meant to reduce DPS debt but which has been turned around on the district during the collapse of the nation's credit markets is a fine mess for sure, Ollie.

Bennet, who gained a business reputation as an inovative financial turnaround artist, used some fancy footwork to conceivably get his district out of a crippling pension burden, but was treated to a little bait-and-switch by the very markets he was so adept at playing.

The deal so far has cost DPS more money than anticipated and now has it entangled in expensive "wind-down" penalties if it decides to back track on the action. The figures being thrown around here range from $25 million to $400 million to $750 million, perhaps small change to Bennet's mentor, Phil Anschutz, but nothing to sneeze at for an inner-city school district.

Bennet also said the New York Times, which reported on the collapse of the DPS deal while Democratic voters are still filling out ballots that will decide whether Bennet gets to stay a U.S. senator, "got it wrong." Yet when you read the story, its details are pretty convincing that "wrong" was the word Bennet should have considered more carefully when the deal was cut back in high-flying 2008.

The Times sometimes gets things wrong, but their authority is a hard wall to breach. Romanoff is right in calling this one a "bet gone bad." Time to close the casino to Wall Street playing with public money. Kids, even bright-eyed neat ones, have no recourse.

Post screams too loud: Buy, buy, buy!

"The Sunday Denver Post ." That's the proud banner of today's newspaper atop everything on its front page but the Post's slogan: "Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire."

Yet at the very bottom of the same page is a red-white-and-green, three-and-a-quarter-inch-deep commercial -- for Target.

Shame, shame, shame on the Post.

What!

What's the problem with an advertisement on the bottom of the front page of a newspaper? The Wall Street Journal does it. Newspapers across the land are doing it because all of them are failing, because their traditional advertisers are failing to advertise, and those advertisers are stupidly failing to recognize that a local newspaper is still probably the largest advertising venue in a region.

What's the big deal?

Well, what if you had just started listening to 9News at Five, or at ten o'clock, and just after Adele Arakawa finished reading the first sentence of the news station's lead story, she took a moment for a little commercial break from her friends at Target!

Then, there on your screen, like at the bottom of the front page of the Post this morning, were images of watermelon, catsup -- or ketchup, as Heinz clearly chooses to spell it -- cole slaw and pork ribs. And a voice-over on the TV said what it says on the bottom of the front page of the Sunday Denver Post: "Right price. Right when you need it."

And those people dared to toss that newspaper at the foot of my driveway this morning.

I'd almost rather read the rag on my computer screen where I can ignore the ads even more easily than I can ignore what I want to ignore in the printed edition of the Post.

Shame, shame on Dean Singleton. Three days after he was deservedly recognized for the good he has done.

Doesn't he know, as the current chair of the Associated Press, that the reason newspapers are losing their traditional audience is not because old readers are dying off and not being being replaced by younger readers. Younger readers will grow to be older readers and learn the newspaper is where you learn the most useful information.

Newspapers are failing because they no longer serve readers the way they should. Independent of advertisers who finance their pages. Free from the pressure to commercialize every darn thing in a reader's life today.

The reason Internet advertising cannot replace the revenues print advertising brings to a newspaper is because the ads on the 'Net are more easily ignored by readers of content on the Internet than they can be ignored in print.

Readers of news don't want to be bothered by ads. But they can't help paging past them.

That's why the tradition of an ad-free front page was established by the old editors of the newspaper industry. Breaking that tradition may gain a minimal increase in short-term cash flow, but by joining the commerical crowd, a newspaper ends its public service to readers who are more interested in news.

No wonder newspapers fall away into the 'Net, and, once there, don't even come close to producing the dollars they have made with printed versions.

Stand up for your readers, Dean Singleton! Be a press baron worthy of the name.

Print the news and print your ads, but allow the reader to choose what's more important, more beautiful, more interesting, more demanding of a reader's attention. Take away that choice and there's no doubt they will leave you like a wet rag in the driveway in the rain.

Where's the value in picking you up?