The BPA newsletter is to be primarily and predominantly a news letter. It is not an advertising vehicle. Limited amounts of advertising are included on a space-available basis and as a value-added proposition for the BPA and its members.
Advertising is not to be interleaved with the articles, forcing articles to be extended over multiple pages.
Current practice is to restrict advertising to the back (half) page of the newsletter. However, it is acceptable for the newsletter editor to place ads inside the newsletter to fill gaps at the end of stories (bottom of column or bottom of page). However, announcements and reminders of BPA and BPA-related events have precedence over ads for such filler locations.
Ads are intended to provide neighborhood business with exposure that they cannot reasonably get in more established media, for example the local newspapers. These may be small businesses that have Barron Park as a primary service area, or they may be neighborhood businesses that are too small to afford advertising in the larger media. The notion of "neighborhood business" includes businesses extends beyond the formal boundaries of Barron Park - for example, businesses on the other side of El Camino Real would be regarded as local - and is a subjective decision to be made by the newletter's editor in consultation with the BPA Board.
We discourage/reject ads from businesses where there is such a wide range of competitors that we would be forced to choose whose ads to run, thereby potentially giving the appearance of favoring certain businesses. This is similar to the policy for the BPA-misc e-mail list. For example, ads for houses-for-sale are inappropriate for BPA-misc: there are well-establish channels for such ads, such ads are not of interest to the majority of the readers of that list, and there are so many realtor living in Barron Park (over 20 at the time this was written) that the e-mail list could easily be overwhelmed by that category of ads and thereby effectively obscure the small-scale, highly localized ads that the e-mail list was intended to support.
Coupons in ads have proved problematic. Many people like to keep their newsletter, especially for the history articles. Hence, they are very reluctant to cut out coupons. If coupons are included, they should be positioned to minimize impact of them being cut out, for example, position it on the edge of the page (away from the spine) and have discardable information on the reverse (for example, the masthead info or the mailing cover).