Who runs this press office, and why it prints the rates

Newspaper advertising is the rare market where the seller controls both the product and the information about its price. This site exists to move some of that information to the buyer’s side of the call: the published figures with their sources attached, the quote-only truth where nothing is published, and the mechanics in plain English.

The three house rules

First, the wire credit: every figure on this site carries a source line naming the document and the retrieval date, printed directly under the number the way a wire service credits a photo. No dated source, no figure. Second, quote-only means quote-only: when a paper publishes no rate, we say so plainly instead of laundering an estimate into a fact, because an invented average would walk into your negotiation pretending to be information. Third, the corrections column: every re-check and every error, dated, in public, feeding the “Rates checked” stamp in every page’s folio strip.

Where the figures come from

Published rate cards and media kits (the WSJ’s 2026 card is the load-bearing document), audited circulation practice via AAM, Pew’s audience research for the readership record, state codes and court rules for the notice bureau, and the FTC and Ghent Workgroup for the rules-and-specs pages. Where the honest answer is “buying craft, not a published rate,” the site labels it exactly that way, in the agate line under the claim.

Funding and independence

The site is independently operated and is not owned by, paid by, or affiliated with any newspaper, chain, or placement service it covers. It may carry clearly marked advertising or affiliate links; no seller covered here buys favorable treatment, and the rate postures on the papers desk are verified against the sellers’ own public sites, not supplied by them.

The wider desk

Sister publications

This press office covers newspapers. Its siblings cover the neighboring buys: advertiseinmagazines.com (the magazine rate desk), advertiseonpodcasts.com, whatiscpm.com for the metric underneath all of it, and averagecac.com for what a customer should cost. Start anywhere; the arithmetic travels.