Times are tough out there in the land of newspapers, but the Wall Street Journal has a plan! No need to write the bullshit! Just let the readers smell it. And you thought those scratch and sniff cards were a thing of the past, eh? Gotcha!

Atrios says: “....maybe people are tired of reading right wing horseshit”. I would add that there’s a lot of elephant shit out there too. We on the blogs haven’t quite figured out how to do the smell thing yet, but we can direct you to an earful.

It’s hard to imagine that when the late James Brown soul-shouted, “Somebody open a window, it’s gettin' funky in here,” the phrase would ever apply to Wall Street.

But then came the news that The Wall Street Journal is planning to adorn its hallowed pages with Rub ‘n’ Sniff ads.

Such shenanigans might be expected from the tabloids, home to all things wack. But the stoic Wall Street Journal? Why, one can almost see the loosening of ties — which, just in case, also make handy nooses.

The idea behind this daisy-fresh experiment is to draw readers and advertisers back to the newspaper industry, which has seen better times, given the lengthening shadow of the Internet.

So perhaps the first smell that this scheme of schemes is emitting is the musty scent of flop-sweat desperation, masked as ingenuity. An article on the Advertising Age Web site is accompanied by a photo of a wad of greenbacks with the caption, “Ahh...that new money smell.” Bullish optimism at play.

The plan wouldn't have been feasible until recently, because the traditional scratch ‘n’ sniff olfactory experience was far too expensive for use in newspapers. But a company called Scentisphere (how Jetsons - and ridiculously close to Futurama’s “Smell-o-scope”) developed a much cheaper way to apply scent to ads and dubbed it Rub ‘n’ Sniff.