The Magazine Industry's Crisis of Conscience

Is it time for magazine editors to take off their white gloves and get down in the mud to grapple for product-placement dollars?

That, in a sentence, is the issue at hand as the American Society of Magazine Editors conducts a sweeping review of its guidelines for safeguarding editorial integrity. As written now, the guidelines seek "to make sure that the difference between advertising and editorial content is transparent to readers and that there is no advertiser influence or pressure on editorial independence."

But a lot of people -- mostly on the business side, but some editors, too -- feel that the rules leave magazines competing against other mediums with one hand tied behind their backs. As one editor tells Ad Age:

I could give a fuck about ASME. As long as it's interesting to the reader, who cares? This ivory-tower approach that edit is so untouchable, and what they're doing is so wonderful and can't be tainted by the stink of advertising, just makes me sick.

At the same time, the current rules don't do a particularly good job of enforcing what they're supposed to enforce. "We've had situations where we've seen violations of the spirit of the guidelines but not the guidelines themselves," says ASME's new CEO, Sid Holt. No doubt he's talking about offenders like Harper's Bazaar, which let a big cosmetics advertiser dictate a 40-page fashion feature, and Esquire, which turned itself into an appendage of Victoria's Secret's marketing department earlier this year.

Even so, it's beyond a doubt that magazines are handicapping themselves. And it's increasingly unclear what the benefit of their asceticism is. At a time when the best comedy and the best drama on TV (that would be 30 Rock and Mad Men, respectively) make no secret of their willingness to write sponsors into their scripts, it's hard to argue that letting ad dollars influence content is an absolute evil.