Author:

Responding to readers who accused the paper of opposing a local smoking ban to further its own economic interests, Austin Chronicle Editor Louis Black says Publisher Nick Barbaro is "the poster child for the financially uninterested" and defends his paper in the strongest terms: "This publication is free. We have neither business plan nor profit target. The staff, in every department, is passionately devoted to the Chronicle, striving for quality beyond reason. ... Over the years, just about everything we've ever done where money was the primary motive has cost us dearly. Most of what we did for love paid off."

Another major TV shop has joined the debate over the disappearance of male TV viewers, claiming that older men now seem to be abandoning the major TV networks. The latest revelation, courtesy of Carat's programming department, finds that the older sub-segment of the men 18- to 34-year-old demographic break has begun to experience serious erosion in the weeks following Fox's post-season baseball coverage.

If you are thinking that sounds like JetBlue, the three-year-old upstart airline, who could blame you? But Song, the new low-fare service Delta Air Lines rolled out in April, is also trying to capture a youthful market by selling style as much as service.

Registered voters are more likely to believe political advertisements placed in newspapers than those on TV or radio, according to a poll sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), Vienna, Va.

In 1987, Ted S. McGregor, Jr. was an intern at the Seattle Weekly. Six years later he started his own alternative weekly on the other side of the state, with his brother Jeremy and mother Jeanne, in their hometown of Spokane. After 10 years at the helm of the family- owned weekly newspaper, McGregor looks back on what it took to "become an important part of the lives of more than 100,000 Inland Northwesterners ."

As the major broadcast networks, Nielsen Media Research and some major ad shops sleuth out the case of the missing 18- to 24-year-old male TV viewer, others believe they have simply shifted time to new medium. And it's not just the Internet.

Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade on advertising featuring a host of ex-jocks, a quirky guy named Dick and a bevy of brawling babes, Miller Brewing Co. has accepted that its name means little to the average beer drinker.