Sen. John Kerry is pushing the Government Accountability Office to look into the government's compliance with an order, created in 2000, aimed at boosting minority advertising contracting, Ad Age reports. The Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential candidate says "it's time we know how the government measures up in meeting its responsibility to reach out to all sectors of the American economy and in keeping its commitment to minority entrepreneurs." Kerry is acting on complaints from an African-American newspaper association that they have seen little, if any, adverting revenue from the federal government. At issues is an executive order signed by …

While "at first glance, it seems like selling popcorn at the opera," the Boston Herald reports that Pabst Blue Ribbon's sponsorship of programming on National Public Radio may "actually be an example of well-positioned, cost-effective marketing." After building what Eric Shepard, executive editor of Beer Marketer's Insights, called a "currency of hipness" among young folks, the NPR deal means Pabst can reach its target audience while avoiding the pushiness of traditional advertising.

After he forked over more than $400 to run an obituary on his mother, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review writes that he would like to meet the newspaper manager who first thought up the practice of paid obits. Mike Hoyt "would like to say to him, What a genius you are, sir! An income stream stretching into infinity!" Or perhaps not, he adds on further reflection, given the current state of the newspaper business. "I would say, Your idea, sir, may mark the precise moment on the timeline when newspapers began a slow drift away from their …

If declines in circulation and ad linage have left the newspaper industry reeling, Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix says that the situation for the other big print medium—magazines--is more complex. “Susceptible to some of the ills affecting newspapers and relatively immune to others, the magazine environment is tough, but not completely inhospitable,” he writes. “There’s bad news at Time, but good news for the Nation. It’s death to Cargo, but life at Men’s Vogue.” Jurkowitz talks to three different experts, only to “get three different takes on the health of magazine publishing,” Among them: Samir Husni (a.k.a. “Mr. …

The disgraced ex-editor of The New York Times, who lost his post at the paper in the wake of the Jayson Blair fabrication/plagiarism scandal, spends much of his time fishing and working on a memoir in his Pennsylvania retirement. But Howell Raines recently took the time to give Forbes' David Andelman a few of his thoughts on the fortunes of his former employer and the newspaper business as a whole. Says Raines, "I think what you have to look at in a business sense in a newspaper of the traditional sort are two sets of numbers that I think are …

He hasn't even said he is running again, but the attack ads on Al Gore have already started, claims the political blog Think Progress. In two 60-second TV spots that premiered Wednesday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute goes after "alarmist" reports on global warming, maintaining that its existence is a matter of dispute. Taglined "Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution, we call it life," the ads will run in more than a dozen cities and are being released just a week before the opening of "An Inconvenient Truth," the former vice president's documentary on climate change. CEI has gotten millions of …

BREAKING NEWS In an apparent bid to buy time and stave off what looks to be a mounting takeover of Aegis Group, the company's board rebuffed French financier Vincent Bollore's nominees to the board and said it would postpone its annual shareholders meeting to June 14 from its original date of May 24.

BREAKING NEWS CBS Radio, the second largest operator of radio stations in the U.S., has entered a seven-year agreement to purchase radio audience ratings based on Arbitron's portable people meter (PPM) system. The move comes as radio giant Clear Channel Communications is pushing an industry initiative to marshal potential competition to Arbitron's system.

Television is the last medium to move online, but it may be first to get it right, reflects MSNBC columnist Michael Rogers. As marketers push more of their dollars online, TV is embracing the Internet with a big advantage, he says: "As the last medium to come to the Web, they have some history to look back on. And both print and the music industry provide key lessons in what not to do." The former, he notes, started out giving everything away with the mistaken assumption they could make it all up in ad revenue or by charging later on …

In the newest attack on alcohol advertising, 20 state attorneys general are pushing the Federal Trade Commission to limit alcohol ads to media where at least 85 percent of the audience is 21 or over, Ad Age reports. The current voluntary industry codes places the floor at 70 percent, a level that the officials claim "overexposes youth to alcohol advertising." But liquor and advertising trade groups hold that there is no causal relationship between advertising and underage drinking and question whether the FTC can impose any limits at all. "It's my strong guess that the FTC could not enforce this," …