The Washington Post Business section for Sunday Jan. 12, 2014 was ALL BUSINESS, I’m happy to report.

After this blog’s unkind criticism of the Sunday business section last week, it’s only fair to note the impressive week-over-week improvement.

The Business section front this Sunday includes real business stories, such as “The inside story of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” and “Bitten by the gold bug? You’ll do well to heed the past.”

In fact, the only shortcoming of this week’s Business section is the full-page house ad on the back page of the section, page G10. “House ad” is newspaper parlance for filling space when you run out of news copy or real advertising.

The house ad on page G10 promotes a new service, “The Capitol Deal,” offered by the newspaper. “Save on Washington!” is the banner line at the top of the page. Information is a little vague, but you can get deals in three categories: “cap deals,” “dish deals,” and “getaway deals.”

“Get local deals e-mailed to you, for FREE.” offers a summary line at the bottom of the page. And below that, a Web address: “thecapitoldeal.com.”

This is not an encouraging development for the newspaper industry. Seems that The Post can’t sell enough advertising in either the newsprint or online editions of the product. So they’re launching a new product that will send ads directly to your inbox! Whose idea was this? I hope The Post didn’t pay good money for market research indicating consumer demand for this new advertising product.

Only advantage I see is, email advertising will never be delivered sopping wet, like newsprint on a rainy day.

I don’t need more e-mails clogging my in-box, thank you very much. If you go to thecapitoldeal.com and find any interesting “deals,” feel free to comment below.

— John