Earlier quoted context omitted.
just googling `w4m` now brings up a ton of prostitution trash >< I don't even want to know what it stands for.
Nothing bad, just "woman (looking) for man". I used to see ads in the local free paper with people looking for relationships. Naturally, m4m, w4w, mw4m etc are also understood.
The newsweeklies that used to carry personals lost a lot of ad revenue when Craigslist took over the space for free. (Some went bankrupt soon after CL added their city, even.) Unlikely that they will get that ad revenue back with CL out of the game, as many won't want to touch personals again for similar reasons to CL, and a lot of the personals space is also moved on to the Match.com/OKCupid/PlentyOfFishes of the internet.