You can spend millions of dollars on an advertising campaign if you have something to sell. Alternately, you can try some cheaper experiments and hope that downmarket charm trumps slickness.

Somebody liked the latter idea at the Chase bank branch on Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan, as this picture, taken by one of our editors, Leslie Gevirtz, shows.

We can't decide if this is a Black Friday coup of marketing genius or if one of the tellers was forced to use only materials in the branch's broom closet. After all, this is the heart of Times Square, a place where every square millimeter is available for your ad, and at very high prices. Major corporations rarely spare expenses -- or electricity -- in presenting their best advertising campaigns in the heart of the U.S. financial capital. On the other hand, Chase *is* handing out $100 to everyone who starts an account. Maybe that's the ad budget, already spent.

The San Bernardino Sun reported details:

"Upland police officers received reports of the disturbance about 2:45 a.m. Friday and sent about four officers to the store at 1540 W. Foothill Boulevard, Lt. Jim Etchason said. 'A manager at the store called it in to the police department,' Etchason said. '(The manager) said numerous customers were causing a disturbance with each other.'"

The cops told managers to close the store while they cleared out shoppers and made them wait in the parking lot. A few hours later, they were allowed to go back inside, the Sun reported. There were no reports of injuries or damage, the paper said on its website.

A company spokesman confirmed the incident, but said the store was cleared out and closed for 45 minutes.

"We're hearing positive feedback from customers and associates in our stores across the country today. Our store plans are helping our customers have a safe and enjoyable shopping experience at Walmart," the spokesman also said.

As long as it's positive feedback.

Other incidents of retail aggression also surfaced on Friday in Brandon (over GPS systems) and Seminole, Florida -- also at Walmart stores. Here's Florida Today:

"People were gathered at the items they wanted to buy. The customers claim the person at the GPS location started selling the devices before 5 a.m. and they started a brawl. In Seminole County, another fight at a Walmart ended with three law enforcement agencies responding. According to WKMG Local 6, the Seminole County Sheriff’s office, Lake Mary Police Department and the Sanford Police Department were all called out to the Walmart about 5 a.m. Officers secured that store before shoppers were told things were safe again."

One big cause of aggression in Colorado and, apparently, the Indianapolis region is the Zhu Zhu -- fuzzy, electronically operated hamsters (The real ones never seem to spark this much annoyance). The Indianapolis Star reports:

"Despite the lines, several shoppers at the Northeastside Toys “R” Us and the Downtown Mass Ave Toys said this afternoon they’d never even heard of the hamster robots. But when the Toys "R" Us opened its doors at midnight Thursday, a huge line backed up into two adjacent parking lots. People tried to cut the line, not listening or cooperating; and there were reports of people fighting at the back of the line. Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department was called after a report of a fight, and dispatched at least three squad cars to the scene, said IMPD Sgt. Paul Thompson. The scuffle was over by the time police arrived, but IMPD stayed in the parking lot for an hour as a precaution."

UPDATE: We weren't joking about the Zhu Zhu hamsters. Read this report and especially watch the video. Thanks to Fox's affiliate TV station in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Florida, area for letting us witness the horror:

"If there was any debate about what this season's hottest toy might be, a group of Black Friday shoppers in Clearwater seems to have settled it. They descended on Zhu Zhu Pets like a pack of starving wolves, tearing through the entire display in seconds. Employees at the Toys R Us in Clearwater could only watch as the madness unfolded (watch to the left). There were an estimated 1,000 people in line before the store opened, and at one point, store managers asked police to keep an eye on the line, which wrapped around the building."

(Photo: Reuters)

In Charlotte, North Carolina, the banking capital of the New South, Black Friday's traditional retail flood was a relative trickle, thanks to residue from the recession. Several Black Friday shoppers said the economic downturn and the plight of the local banks would play a major role in how the city's residents spent during the holidays.

"We're spending very differently than we ever have, and I don't see that changing for a long time," said Rob Seidman, 39, a Charlotte resident and a banker. He declined to say which bank he worked for, only to say it "employed thousands here."

The signs of the downturn were most evident in hallways of the South Park Mall in the city's tony neighborhood of the same name, home to more than a few of Charlotte's bankers. The mall opened at 8 a.m., just like last year and three hours later than it did in 2007. Few shoppers were there to bolt inside. Many shoppers who arrived later said they had spent the morning's earliest hours fighting lines and crowds at discount retailers, like Target and Walmart, noting those stores were busier than they had ever seen them as shoppers sought bargains.

Charlotte resident Don Smith, 49,  came to the mall to buy some running shoes on sale, along with a few other items with his wife and two young daughters.

"This is the second time I've been out on Black Friday," he said. "I hate to shop this way, but there's no crowds this morning. It's a great day if you ask me."

A spokeswoman said the mall expected 200,000 visitors on today, a significant chunk of the 12million to 13 million who visit each year.

Several shoppers interviewed by Reuters said they were merely window shopping. Mall patrons walking around laden with bags were dwarfed by those walking around empty-handed. Seidman, sitting near one of the few hubs of activity -- the Apple Store -- said he was out shopping primarily to replace a broken family computer. While his wife was doing more holiday shopping, he was done for the day.

He said he and his family scrapped holiday vacation plans this year, were spending less on gifts for kids and adults and more closely adhering to a pre-determined budget. While he's still employed, the downturn has changed his spending habits forever, he said, as he's seen friends lose their jobs and in some cases their homes.

He's aggressively saving for retirement and squirreling away cash, rather than spending more as he did in the past, "because I've seen how some people in my neighborhood and who I work with lose it all so fast."

"Mine thankfully is an issue of psychology rather than an issue of need," he added, noting layoffs in the sector made him fear the worst and curb much of his spending. "I feel like I need more of a cushion in case something happens."

(Photo: Shadows gather over Charlotte, North Carolina. Reuters)

I've been scanning the headlines for reports of injuries caused by shoppers whose quest for ecstasy means beating other people -- with their fists if necessary -- to things that big corporations sell to make customers temporarily feel better and to make shareholders feel better all the way through the fourth quarter.

It looks like fists flew at least once today. Here's the story, "Elderly woman shoved to the ground in Black Friday squabble," courtesy of 9News.com, reporting from Centennial, Colorado:

"[Police] say shoppers started arguing before the store opened as people jockeyed for line position. Deputies say some shoppers were pushing each other when a woman was pushed into a 78-year-old woman. The elderly woman fell to the ground. She told ambulance crews on scene that her hands hurt but she was not transported to the hospital and first responders say she did not receive any major injuries."

The story also said that she wound up in a crowd chasing the Zhu Zhu, a toy hamster that your kids will forget about a few months after you give it to them.

Any other reports of mayhem out there? Let us know. So far, we haven't seen any repeats of last year's tragic scenario, where shoppers trampled a Walmart worker to death as they raced to catch deep discounts.

Reuters photo

To recap, here's how it would work.

• Microsoft would pay News Corp for the privilege of being the only search engine to carry results from papers including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Times of London.
• Microsoft thinks it can get more people to use its search engine, drawing them away from Google.
• News Corp could punish Google, in essence, for making tons of money from the ads it serves alongside news search results. Why, the thinking goes, should Google make a bunch of money off the news that we produce and our newsrooms go starving and our ad sales tank?
• Other newspaper publishers, if they see Murdoch making it work, might think the same thing and abandon Google en masse.

I and many others wrote that it would be a gamble at best. What if people don't care that much about news? If the 70 percent of the search market that uses Google discovers  the news is absent, will they switch search engines? Scientists of misanthropy like me say it's unlikely. If they don't find it, they won't seek it.

Gapper at the FT has another way of looking at it:

In effect, (Murdoch) would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing. That suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not "get" the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible. ...

Mr Murdoch appears to have decided he will not lose very much by ditching Google traffic and even a fairly small payment from Microsoft would compensate. He is attempting to get distributors to pay for content in the way that US cable operators pay cable networks for programming. ...  If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?

In other words: You, Mr. or Ms. Newspaper Publisher, hate Google because you're in a co-dependent relationship. You need Google, but Google hurts you too, so you want to escape from Google, but you can't... But think about it this way: How much worse can it be? You're shedding hundreds, if not thousands of jobs, and you call 25 percent ad revenue declines an improvement over how they were a few months ago. What's NOT to lose? And if someone's paying you more than you're making now?

Not to add too many question marks to one blog post, but does this make Rupert Murdoch the smartest man in newspapers?

And now The Washington Post is laying off staff, sources told me on Friday, and a spokeswoman confirmed.

The Post has cut an unknown number of washingtonpost.com workers, the website folks who until now have worked separately at the dot-com headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from the Post's headquarters in Washington, D.C. One source told me up to 10 are going. That's not as big a number as other places you've read about lately, but it's still a painful cut. (Disclosure: I worked for The Washington Post Co. from 1998 to 2005)

Sources shared several names with me, but until those people confirm that they were laid off, I don't want to publish them. What I can say is that there were several journalists and marketing people among the casualties. They are getting severance packages, but they are accompanied by non-disclosure agreements which prevent them from discussing their firings. Apparently, some of my sources said, they will be out of work by Dec. 31.

Why is this happening? Here's what spokeswoman Kris Coratti said:

As part of the work we're doing to turn around the business that supports our journalism, there were a small number of individual positions eliminated as a result of efficiencies we have found through our new structure and through new technology, and those have taken place in both print and online.

The background: The Post's web staff, as I mentioned, is joining the main newsroom as they eliminate the gap that the paper set up many years ago by making its website a separate operation. The company, all my sources tell me, want to cut staff before the end of the year because next year the remainder would become unionized. Web staff are not unionized now. That, my sources say, would make it much more difficult for the money-losing Washington Post to cut costs by laying off people because they would be protected to some extent by their contract.

With yet layoffs taking place at U.S. media outlets from Conde Nast to BusinessWeek to Time Inc., and advertising revenue showing little sign of rising anytime soon, I have a feeling that we'll continue to read grim entries like this one.

It must have hit New York Times reporter Tim Arango's e-mail inbox first (his writeup appeared about five minutes before I got the press release).

Here is what he wrote about Ginsberg, 47, the second senior executive to leave News Corp in recent months, following Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin:

Mr. Ginsberg, a former lawyer in the Clinton White House, was hired in 1999 to be News Corporation's director of communications. He was hired partly to refurbish the company's image after a controversy in which Mr. Murdoch was said to have stopped publication of a book by Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong, to curry favor with the Chinese government. Mr. Ginsberg's portfolio within News Corporation expanded well beyond public relations. He gradually gained control over investor relations, marketing and corporate social responsibility. He also became an important bridge between Mr. Murdoch and Democratic politicians, particularly Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Ginsberg, Arango said, arranged a lunch between Bill Clinton and Murdoch in Harlem, and a year later with a New York Post newsroom tour. Eventually, the Post endorsed Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate in 2006 and Murdoch threw her a fundraiser at News Corp's headquarters. (Yes, that is quite a feat to arrange for a newspaper that under Murdoch has leaned Republican more often than not.)

It's also a feat to get a well-known Democrat to say what he said in the press release:

I will always be grateful to Rupert for the many opportunities he's given me over the years... It was a difficult decision to leave a company that has been such a vital part of my life and I'll miss the many talented colleagues who have helped make this such a thrilling and fascinating ride. But I've been thinking about leaving for a while now to pursue something new, and this seemed like the right time to do it.

Teri Everett, who spends plenty of time dealing with the horde of reporters who cover News Corp's every move, will take over as the new communications chief. Reed Nolte will run investor relations.

Keep in mind that Thomson Reuters likes to remind people when they ask these questions that Thomson Corp, before buying Reuters, got out of its Canadian newspaper empire for a reason. (See below)

I asked our chief executive, Tom Glocer, a question along these lines on a Thursday phone call he had with reporters to discuss the company's third-quarter financial results.

Here is what he said:

Thomson did a remarkable job, far earlier than any other company I know, of seeing what was coming and transitioning their business out of print for the most part... I don't see any particular time or reason at this juncture why we should go the other way.

Later on Thursday, when I interviewed Glocer, we returned to this theme. (I can't help it, I'm a print guy.) I used the Financial Times, owned by Pearson Plc and beloved of its CEO, Dame Marjorie Scardino, as a sample target:

Here is Glocer's reply:

When I came to London, Marjorie was famous for saying she would never sell the FT, or it would go "over my dead body." There were many years in which the FT had fallen on harder times when people held that up as well: Marjorie has to go before the FT.

That sounds like a "no" on the FT. What about other properties?

Is it impossible that somewhere in the world that we'd take a print property and move it electronic? No, but we're not looking to go out and buy consumer print publications. That's not what we think our business is.

That sounds like a "no" on print. At that point, Chief Financial Officer Bob Daleo took over, saying that Thomson Reuters is a company where "what we shy away from are advertising-based models. We charge for content, we charge for information and news."

What about Reuters.com, an ad-supported site that runs our news? Glocer said:

I would argue that the overwhelming amount of our news is behind the firewall in the sense that you only get it as part of a product that you pay for. It's great that we have it. I'm very proud of reuters.com. I use it on weekends and evenings when I'm not in front of my bigger service, my subscription service.

I asked one more question on print: Why did Thomson Reuters get involved in any way at all with ZelnickMedia's losing bid for BusinessWeek? What was that about?

We had no ownership interest or economics in the deal... We have done very similar things already. I would point you to the deal with the International Herald Tribune where Reuters supplies a couple pages' worth of business news. So the way I'd think of it is, we have a news agency providing television, text, photos, etc.... There is no particular magic about BusinessWeek. We stand ready to do sensible, commercial deals to help deliver value to media customers, and it's not a sort of, 'Well the TR play is BusinessWeek.' It never was. For a while it got reported like that because it was amusing to people."

And that's the last word on print...today.

When they meet at the Plaza, they will talk about a ton of different things that their customers, their investors and other readers want to know. I have to apologize for them because they're not letting in any riff-raff. And that includes reporters who get paid to spend all day figuring out how these people decide what kind of entertainment you want, what kind of technology you pay them for and what deals they pursue with the money that you give them when you buy their stock. This event always excludes press, but that's no reason not to highlight what you probably are missing because of this. After all, who wants to wait for the 8-K filing?

Some press will be allowed, but it will be an assortment of celebrity journalists who will moderate panels and, according to Peter Kafka, author of "MediaMemo" at News Corp's AllThingsD blog, will not write about the event (I'm talking about Maria Bartiromo and David Faber of CNBC, The New Yorker's Ken Auletta, etc).

Peter wrote two posts about this, here and here. He also issued me a challenge to sneak into the conference, but horror of horrors, I'm on a deadline that I can't shirk any longer. So consider this an invitation from me to you to go to the Plaza and catch these guys on the way in and out of the building. It's a fun way to spend the day, and maybe you'll learn something interesting.

Here is the agenda, courtesy of Peter Kafka. Below that is a list of speakers. Outrage breeds corrections: I have to amend the record: The list I had posted here of topics is last year's agenda. My mistake. The list of speakers appearing THIS year still appears below.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, "Annals of Communications", The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

(Photo of Barry Diller, who will remain away from prying eyes at Quadrangle's confab: Reuters)

In the press release, the Times Co noted the two Pulitzer Prizes that the Globe won under Ainsley's reign. It didn't mention that other thing that happened this year, which was the Times threatening to close the paper unless unions buckled and agreed to millions of dollars in concessions to stem outrageous operating losses that could have hit $85 million this year. It also didn't mention the layoffs, the closing of the Globe's international bureaus and the attempts to sell the Globe for next to nothing after buying it in 1993 for $1.1 billion.

But those are details.

The Globe's story says that Ainsley is considering nonprofit work after the Times. All we can add is: Isn't that what you've been doing at the Globe?

Here are a few excerpts, meanwhile, from the Globe story:

Ainsley said he was glad to have seen the Globe through to a stronger financial position. "It's been difficult but enormously gratifying,'' he said. "Clearly we've had a lot of work to do here this year. I think we've made extraordinary progress in getting the Globe on sound financial footing." Mayer, a native of upstate New York and a graduate of Yale University, said he is enthusiastic about the Globe's prospects. "It's a big challenge but it's also a great opportunity and a great institution,'' Mayer said.

Asked whether he anticipates making changes at the paper, he said the Globe has "very talented people,'' and that he and his team will be working on strategies to take the Globe into the evolving digital era.

"There's a lot of passion for what we do,'' Mayer said. "The journalism is important, and we need a business model that enables us to continue to do that."

UPDATE:

By the way, it looks like Ainsley is eligible to receive a $1,215,927 departure package of sorts. That is the total of various restricted stock units, deferred compensation and retirement benefits listed in the Times Co's most recent proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I asked a Globe spokesman whether Ainsley will take that money, or whether he'll leave any of that on the table in the spirit of the Times asking Globe employees to allow their benefits and pay to be cut. Can't hurt to ask, right? I'll update again when he replies.

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