CINCINNATI — Generally speaking, newspaper advertising revenues are like the stock market … if you were paying attention beginning in 1929 and ending in 1933. They only trend in one direction. For that small segment of the population who happens to be employed by a newspaper, it’s not a good direction.

In fact, it seems that there are so few groups of people or businesses who regularly buy ads in newspapers anymore, you can almost count them on one hand. One is professional athletes who live and work in one city long enough to feel an emotional connection when they leave.

So when Dodgers second baseman Chase Utley took out a full-page ad in Sunday’s Philadelphia Daily News, it tugged at my heart. Not so much because it was classy or respectful — though it was certainly both — but because it validated the daily newspaper as a social institution. You can take out a full page of the internet and no one will notice. Take out a full page of the newspaper and it means something, revenue trends be damned.

Here’s the ad (h/t Ryan Lawrence on Twitter):