Denver Post tells writers to stop making picks in games they cover

Jared,

I'm looking for a sturdy saddle to use when I ride my high horse. Where did you find yours?

 

I heard a rumor that the ME of the BFE Times crashed his Spree and went head-over-heels over the handlebars after he hit an unsighted chain that he ran into that was across a parking lot driveway.

Come to think of it, Nelson Mundt comes to mind as I typed that.

 

To think that a newspaper shouldn't promote sports gambling is to ride a high horse? Come to think of it, I'm not sure any mainstream newspaper does a stocks-picking column, and that's a legal form of gambling.

 

Didn't newspapers used to run columns on the biz page about stock tips? I'm pretty sure one of my old papers used to -- maybe still does -- run the Motley Fool stock tips column once a week.

 

Clearly, I don't read many business sections...this from Motley Fool's home page...

"Newspaper column: Through a successful decade-long partnership with Universal Press Syndicate, some 200 publications across North America carry The Motley Fool's weekly newspaper column."

 

There you go.

I think you're being a little too uptight about this whole gambling in newspapers thing. Just about everything in the sports section benefits gamblers, whether you run the lines or the injury reports or even the scores from last night's games.

 

What it comes down to too often is, newspapers are OK with promoting gambling as long as they can pretend they're not promoting gambling. At least we haven't seen any ledes (yet) that say, "Podunk High stretched its winning streak to six games last night but its failure to cover for the sixth straight week has put Coach Parlay's future in doubt."

 

You miss the point. Point was, if papers really were OK with gambling, they'd write such ledes. But they know they can't go that far because gambling is illegal.

 

Why would they go that far?

I'm sure newspapers are okay with lots of things they don't spell out in their ledes.

Newspapers run betting lines in their agate. There can be no stronger indication that they are okay with sports gambling.

 

OK, I'll go away. But with one more thought. Sure, keep the entries and results if you're among the few papers that can afford to waste the space on information available for free other places. Then leave out the stuff that's there to help folks gambling illegally. You could replace it with reporting and writing.