Favre screws Pack, Green Bay Press-Gazette

Those paying particularly close attention to the sports news of the past week might have noticed one Brett Favre attempting to come out of retirement. It has been bad news for most people involved. To Brett’s dismay, the Packers want to move forward. To the  Packers dismay, Packer fans don’t want to move forward. And to the Vikings dismay, tampering with contract renegotiations is still very much against the rules. Not even the Green Bay Press-Gazette can claim the not-quite-yet unretirement as a positive – and they’ve been the last week of Favre-heavy issues so well that they’ve had to increase press runs by 15%.

Web traffic is up. Comments are up. But sales of the March 4 edition, which reported on the Farve retirement are way down. The paper, normally $1, was pulling in $3.75 for copies of that issue. People were buying thousands of dollars worth at a time.

"We were going to set up a booth at training camp to sell these items," said Dave Sielski, single-copy manager. "This has made it difficult to sell anything, people are holding back. It has gone down to almost nothing. People do not want to buy something that is basically useless if he does come back." -[E&P]