The Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News began running paid advertisements on their front pages last month, becoming the two largest in Texas to join the growing trend as newspapers continue searching for new revenue sources and advertising dollars.

The move is part of a larger initiative at all Hearst Corp. daily newspapers, including The Beaumont Enterprise and three other dailies the company owns in Texas.

Bill Offill, advertising director for the Houston Chronicle, said the ad staff had sold 80 percent of the available front-page space just one month into the offer.

The San Antonio Express-News announced the change in a memo to newsroom employees.

Editor Bob Rivard wrote, “While none of us welcome this development, there is a certain inevitability to the news given that newspapers ranging from USA Today to The Wall Street Journal routinely sell page one and section front advertisements.”

Front-page ads are not a novelty in newspapers but rather a fashion that has come in and out of style in the industry’s storied history. But they began their most recent resurgence in the late 1990s.

When TPA first conducted a survey of ads on Texas newspaper front pages in 2000, only a handful were doing it. Now it’s gaining in popularity and nearly half of all Texas dailies and one-fourth of weeklies run ads on their front pages in some way, shape or form.

In February, TPA conducted another survey of daily and weekly newspapers.

Of the 71 dailies surveyed, 45 percent run some type of paid ad on their front pages. That is an 11 percent increase since the second TPA survey in fall 2006 that found only 32 percent of dailies were running front-page ads.

The most recent survey also studied ad placement and found that 23 dailies run strip ads along the bottom of the front page while only four dailies run ads on the top and bottom of the front page. Two dailies run ads in the top, bottom and left-hand rail of the front page.