Who Had the Worst Week?

• New Casa Bonita owners Trey Parker and Matt Stone reportedly spent $40 million renovating the iconic restaurant. If Casa Bonita maintains standard restaurant profit margins, Parker and Stone only need to generate somewhere between $400 million and $650 million in revenue to make back their investment.
• Boulder County investigators determined that the billion-dollar Marshall Fire likely had two ignition sources: an Xcel power line and embers from a trash fire on property owned by the religious cult-like organization Twelve Tribes. I’m guessing most of the lawsuits are filed against Xcel.
• PR agencies nationally are seeing a sharp rise in bad debt from clients who are walking away from their bills.
• The PGA Tour. Where to begin? Convincing golfers such as Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy to reject literally hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi-funded LIV Golf, only to then turn around and merge with the rival league? Spending two years making moral arguments (9/11, Jamal Khashoggi, women’s rights, etc.) against the Saudi league, only to, again, turn around and merge with it? Blindsiding its own golfers and having them learn about the merger on social media? It goes on and on. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan has to be a dead man walking, although at least not in the Khashoggi way.
• CNN fired CEO Chris Licht after a string of bad decisions. He had only been CEO for 13 months. Also gone: the communications team that was behind the brutal Atlantic article that sealed Licht’s fate.
• The Los Angeles Times is cutting 10% of its newsroom staff. Meanwhile, hundreds of Gannett journalists walked off the job to protest the company’s continued job cuts.
• Scripps, the parent company of Denver7, announced that companywide layoffs are coming and that newsrooms will also be affected.
• You know how national media don’t really pay attention to winter storms until they reach Illinois and Ohio? The same thing is happening with smoke from forest fires. More than 75 million people in the Northeast, Midwest and mid-Atlantic are under air quality alerts due to smoke from forest fires in Canada, and national media is all over it.
• Denver’s last drive-in movie theater is closing.
• Actress/talk show host Drew Barrymore has gone to war with tabloids that reported that she wished her mother was dead.
• “90210” actress Shannen Doherty shared that her breast cancer has spread to her brain.
• Twitter ad sales dropped 59% as advertisers continue to flee the social media platform.
• A Denver woman went on a crusade demanding that her rusted-out RTD bus-stop shelter and overflowing trash can be maintained better. She got results. The shelter and trash can have been removed entirely.

So, who won the week?

• MLS may be an also-ran soccer league globally, but the league’s Inter Miami franchise just signed the biggest soccer star in the world – Lionel Messi.
• Modelo Especial has supplanted Bud Light as the nation’s top-selling beer, amid Bud Light’s transgender marketing woes.
• Do energy drinks and ribeye steaks make you live longer? Probably not due to heart attacks. But scientists think an amino acid contained in both of those may offer insight into how to slow the aging process.
• Colorado ski resorts saw a record-breaking 2022-2023 ski season.
• Cameron Schaefer, the CEO of Denver’s Vinyl Me, Please record club, was named to Billboard’s 40 Under 40 List.