Advertising terms and conditions

— for Current and Current.org

Payment Terms

All invoices are net 30 to Current.

Payments may be made online at

current.org/advertise-with-current

(Classified job ads require credit card payment at time of placement.

Cancellation Policy

Cancellations for print ads must be made by the Reservation Deadline of the issue in which the ad will appear. Late cancellations will result in being billed for 50% of the original invoice.

Frequency Discounts

Discounts are based on the number of insertions, or ads ordered. One month online, one enewsletter ad, one podcast, one DOS package, or one print ad each count as a single insertion. (Does not include classified job ads)

Design and Composition

We can assist, but we urge you to assign your own professional designer to prepare ads. Our design rates are $75 per hour.

Delivering material:

Email pdf files of 8MB or less to [email protected].

For larger files, contact us for a Dropbox link.

Preferred Online File Formats

Ads may be submitted as JPEG, GIF, or animated GIF. Use web image specs rather than print – that is, 72 dpi and RGB color.

No “strobing”or extreme flashing or blinking. Current will make the final determination on acceptance. Call if you’d like to include audio or video.

No advertorials, please. Do not imitate Current editorial graphics or use our regular print typefaces (Freight, Freight sans, Franklin Gothic and Cheltenham).

Current will deliver your online ad through our vendor, Google DoubleClick for Publishers. No third-party servers permitted.

Preferred print file format:

Adobe PDFX/1a:2001. All fonts and images must be embedded. Be sure the color settings of all elements are CMYK. Image file types within the pdfs: Scan photos at 200-300dpi

Defensive Design to Avoid Print Color Gremlins

Newspaper web offset printing isn’t guaranteed to equal magazine quality, especially for an entire press run. Alignment or registration of the four colors can be quite good. When it’s not, defensive design can save your ad.

Watch your color builds

The guideline for maximum ink density for color build areas is a total of 220%. Please check your settings in ads that have four-color art, photos or single-color reversed areas. Color builds at a higher percentage will oversaturate the page. They run the risk of bleeding.

Make it CMYK

If your ad will print in process color, use only CMYK images. Be sure that you have converted all RGB color images to CMYK.

Protect your legibility

For small print (12 point or smaller) use black plate only. Likewise, don’t reverse small white print out of a multi-ink background. Most risky of all: thin typefaces printed small and with multiple inks.

Beware of large areas of a single ink

They can give you uneven color for at least part of a press run. Building the background color from multiple inks helps your odds. If you must use a solid area of one ink, screen it 80% or 90%.

Color Matching

Don’t expect colors to match all the colors you see on your computer screen. PDFs and other RGB computer files show a different range of hues than CMYK inks are capable of printing. Some RGB and spot colors can’t be recreated in CMYK. Colors will always be much “hotter” on a screen than it will be as ink on newsprint. Process ink colors are transparent and the ink absorption factor on an uncoated paper diffuses color.