LA Times runs fire ads with arson photos

First off, nice photo! The image by Barbara Davidson shows the destroyed Da Vinci apartments against the northbound Harbor Freeway — part of a photo gallery at the top of the Los Angeles Times website right now. But if I'm the RealFyre gas logs people, I'm not sure I want my ad — slogan "Fire without the Fuss" — running alongside a story about the biggest arson case in Los Angeles in a long time. For readers, it's a nice laugh. For the Times, I guess the moral is that feeding contextual ads to your most prominent web page still requires a bit of human oversight. The news angle, by the way, is that officials have offered a reward of $170,000 for information leading to the Da Vinci arsonist.

By the way, I'm not sure this alternate ad is much better, contextually speaking. I mean, it was a wood-framed building under construction that burned down in a matter of minutes.