Newspapers may be the original grassroots medium, but you'd never know it judging by their piece of the political-ad pie. The Newspaper Association of America's drive to get candidates — and newspapers themselves — to see the potential in political print ads gained impetus last August, however, when its bipartisan poll of 1,200 registered voters nationwide showed that 7 out of 10 regularly read newspapers.

A new survey finds that 69% of the largest 232 newspapers in the U.S. now offer the option of Web-only help-wanted advertising for employers, compared with 45% in January 2003. The findings were released today by New York-based market research company Corzen Inc.

Online ad spending surged 38 percent during the fourth quarter of 2003, the fastest rate of growth of any quarter since the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers began tracking online ad sales in 1996.

Not everyone in the paper's circulation area is at the beach. The new name better reflects where the alternative newsweekly's readers live and work, says executive editor and CEO Bradley Zeve. With a circulation of 40,000 in the communities of the Monterey Peninsula and Salinas Valley, the weekly is much better read than competing papers owned by media giants Knight Ridder and Gannett. Zeve says the weekly's mission of inspiring "independent thinking and conscious action" will continue.

A growing number of large marketers are finding Internet direct-marketing and relationship-building strategies more effective than TV advertising, attendees at the iMedia Brand Summit heard. During a session that quickly became a seminar of negative comparisons to TV advertising, some of the country's largest marketers detailed how "on the cheap" Internet methods have become a central muscle of their marketing communications programs. Some described their successes with pure Internet plays, others with strategies that used economical Internet tie-ins to boost the impact of their TV buys.

And will all of that high profile Super Bowl advertising pay off this year? The online jobs giant today reported a fourth quarter profit earning $12.1 million or 11 cents per share. Not too shabby considering an economy that continues to sputter and compared to the same period a year ago when it posted a $51 million loss for the quarter. Quarterly sales nudged four percent to $170.8 million from $164.4 million compared to the same period a year ago.

Obsession with silly rules gets in the way of good journalism, writes Willy Stern. His against-the-grain column stands up for an op-ed editor who was pilloried for offering to let the mayor of Austin, Texas, see a draft of an editorial. By the standards applied in that case, editor Bruce Dobie would be fired if he worked anywhere but the Scene, says contributing editor Stern, who is also a media ethicist. "At this weekly paper, prior to publication, we routinely show sources entire drafts of stories," he discloses. "We routinely read quotes to sources before we go to print. We even share drafts with sources' attorneys—including attorneys who have threatened to sue us." Stern presents six reasons for allowing subjects to read stories before publication.

Optimism, a sentiment often in short supply among interactive marketers and publishers since the bubble burst of 2001, reared its head at the iMedia Communications Brand Summit here today, as marketing executives and researchers pointed to signs interactive marketing is gaining traction as a supplement or even alternative to TV advertising.