As ECF Publicity Officer I'll try to answer a few points. I agree there are a lot of people who purely play chess on the web, and with the right advertising could probably be attracted to clubs. As far as I'm aware ICC and Playchess don't have any adverts, they rely purely on subscriptions, but sites like Yahoo, Msn, etc have large online chess communities. The only problem is it probably costs a great deal to advertise on the sites. Even more specialist ones such as chess.com probably charge a fair deal for advertising. If you have any suggestions for how to reach the 'web chess' audience that is relatively inexpensive, I'd be delighted to hear it.
Putting adverts in schools, colleges, libraries etc would almost certainly lead to an increase in numbers at chess clubs if handled the right way, but it does need people at their local clubs who are willing to volunteer time and effort, and at a lot of clubs these people don't exist.
As far as getting more media involvment- well, I've only been in the job officially for a little less then a week, so I wouldn't expect any results yet, but I'm sending previews of congresses, and results of congresses to as many forms of local media as I can think of. I don't think there's any getting away from the fact that chess is going to be a hard sell. I'm expecting a lot of phone calls, emails to just be ignored, but all I can do is try, try and try again, and hopefully it'll produce some results.
I find congresses are quite well publicized on websites, and with entry forms at congresses, but- and I don't mind being corrected on this one- I find that congresses tend to send out entry forms only to people who have entered in previous years. Which means that people who don't regularly check local chess websites tend to miss some congresses that they would attend had they known. At the moment I'm passing around the idea to the various County Presidents (this was suggested by Sean Hewitt) of having a mailing list with people volunteering which types of congresses they'd like to enter (slowplay, quickplay etc) and how far they'd be prepared to travel. It's only at the suggestion stage at the moment, but hopefully something good'll come of it.
Your suggestions about holding simultaneous displays and stands at local shows are both good ones, it only requires people who are prepared to do it, and people who are prepared to organise it. In many cases one, or the other, or both simply don't exist.
Finally, I went down to Paignton myself last Thursday, and have to say in terms of venue, I don't think I've seen one much better. And I'm not just saying that because I'm biased towards South West tournaments.
