• by February 20, 2004

The Online Publishers Association today named Larry Kramer, who is chairman and CEO of CBS MarketWatch.com, as its new chairman. Kramer, who served as the OPA's vice chairman and was also a founding member of the association, succeeds Christopher Schroeder, the former CEO-publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. Schroeder stepped down from the post in January after he was named VP-strategy for the Washington Post Co., WPNI's parent company.

"2004 looks to be a promising year for the online publishing industry, and I'm excited to offer my insight to the OPA's efforts as chairman," Kramer says. "I was a founding board member of the OPA, and we spent those first few years building a respected and meaningful organization around the idea of proprietary online content."

In his new role, Kramer says he will continue to evangelize the role of online media within the overall media mix, and advance the OPA's research efforts: "We'll take an even broader role in highlighting the value of the Internet and highlighting the behavior of people on the Internet. Advertisers have always ultimately gone where the viewer is," he says.

During the past year, the OPA has conducted original research into the online at-work audience, consumer loyalty to online brands, and ethnographic studies into consumers' attitudes about online media. The OPA is on the verge of issuing a detailed study of 18-to-34-year-olds. "It's in our interest to get as much interest as possible on behavioral shifts so that we are able to establish a more accurate description of how people are using the Internet," Kramer says, adding: "It matters to advertisers. . . We want to bring the advertising world up to speed on the various things available to them on the Web, the technological improvements, and the expectations they can have for advertising."

Kramer says that this year, the OPA will focus on spam initiatives and other legal issues surrounding commercial opt-in emails, create a task force to assess video on the Web, and work on more case studies. "I'm also very interested in the alternative ways people are going to access the Internet," Kramer says, given MarketWatch's position as an online financial and business destination. Apart from Kramer's new role, Debora Wilson, chief operating officer of The Weather Channel and weather.com, will serve as OPA treasurer, and Riley McDonough, VP-sales and marketing for the ESPN Internet Group, is the group's secretary.

Separately, the OPA announced new members. They are: ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, CNN.com, iVillage, Jupiter Media, MTV.com, and Reuters. "We are thrilled to welcome such an excellent group of new members and associates to our association," says Michael Zimbalist, executive director of the OPA. "With each new member, we gain incredible insight and limitless ideas that enable us to support, advance, and accelerate the business of online publishing."