Advertising on stamps

The Lincoln Journal Star (Lincoln,NE) and Long Beach Press-Telgraph report that the US Postal Service is expected to decide shortly on whether to launch a test program that would allow advertising on postage.

In the Federal Register, the postal service said the program could launch as early as next week. Executives at stamp companies expected it to start no later than the end of April.

It's part of the agency's effort to make postage more popular in an era when e-mail has been reducing the volume of first-class mail. The test would be an expansion of an existing program in which authorized Web sites allow people to personalize postage with photos.