Everyone’s flailing for ways to grab the attention of easily distracted readers. Sam Zell, Tribune Co. owner, wants half of his newspapers’ content to be ads and his writers to spit out more filler between the ads. USA TODAY practically re-invented the full-color fluff piece. Tabloid journalism has a long tradition of easy targets and sob stories.

Still, we were struck by the audacity of the SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER’s Jim Moore this morning when we saw he wrote an entire column about how much locally popular Seattle Seahawk Patrick Kerney loves his yellow lab. That’s the whole piece. No larger agenda. No charity work. Just… “local man loves dogs”. It’s damned near quaint.

We imagine the print edition of the P-I today looked like this:

We’ll take two. No, three. Hell, we’re stealing the whole stack out of the box.

We’ve hung some pieces over the years on some very brittle tenterhooks ourselves to make deadlines despite our best efforts, so we understand there will be better topics (and better days) than others. However, we will try our level best to keep our blatant attempts at traffic increases to cheerleaders, traumatic amputations, and shots to the groin. After all, we have standards.