Seeing Red in Orange   

Texas editor protests ad placed in sports column.

He had delivered his letter of resignation. Pulled awards off the wall. Called potential new employers.
Orange Leader Executive Editor Dave Mundy didn't want to work at the Texas daily after it ran an ad in January within the body of an outdoor column by Chester Moore. (The ad was beneath Moore's mug shot.) Mundy's protestations were overruled by the publisher of the Leader's sister paper, the Port Arthur News. "I put my bristles up and started strutting around and screaming ethics," says Mundy, 42, who gave two week's notice.
But his resignation abruptly ended several days later when officials at the Leader's parent company, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., told Mundy they agreed with him and would move future ads next to the column, instead. "When we looked at it, we said, 'Of course that's not something we would do,' " says Vickey Williams, director of editorial services for CNHI, a chain of more than 200 daily, weekly and semi-weekly papers. "It's one of those goofs that papers do all the time."
Joe Ben Oller, the publisher of the Port Arthur News who supported the ad placement, says his paper had run ads in columns before, and he doesn't understand why everyone's fussing about it. "They're simply sports columns.... [The advertiser is] not controlling it," Oller says. The publisher says he objects more to placing ads on the front page of a newspaper. "Once you do that, I don't know what your grounds are in objecting to sponsoring a sports column."
The chain allows its publishers to decide on front-page ads on a paper-by-paper basis, says Williams. While the Port Arthur News does not sell page one ads, the Orange Leader, circulation 8,500, does. The ad Oller advocated placing in the sports column was for Texas Marine, a boat sales company Mundy says while he doesn't care for the ads on the Leader's front page, that's not the same as allowing someone to sponsor a column. "It could have led to such things as somebody sponsoring my editorial page and telling me what to write--that's a different kettle of fish."