The line between advertising and editorial in magazines has grown fainter and fainter in the past few years. Some blame the new shopping magazines such as Conde Nast’s Lucky and Hearst’s Shop, Etc., which plug products as the major part of their editorial content, for the obvious erosion. Others claim pressured publishers are capitulating to advertisers’ demands because of the greater cooperation that marketers now receive from movies and TV. One soon-to-be launched publication in which this “church-and-state” divide will practically disappear is TV Guide’s upcoming magazine Inside TV. Yet another celebrity-besotted weekly, Inside TV will be on newsstands in April and is aimed at a younger audience than its parent.

What makes it unusual – and controversial – is that advertisers will be able to buy directly into the magazine’s editorial content to promote their products. For example, a makeup company will be allowed to put its eyeliner or lipgloss in Inside TV’s “recommended” product lists, selected to help readers emulate, for example, the look of the dishiest of the “Desperate Housewives.”

Will that confuse readers? TV Guide’s president, John Loughlin, told industry publication Advertising Age, “Our rule of thumb is it should be absolutely explicit and apparent” when and where such product placements are inserted. They will be labeled with the advertiser’s logo. “Consumers are smart enough to make their own judgments about effectiveness and appropriateness,” Mr. Loughlin said.

Advertisers will pay up to get their brand names in weekly reader polls that could relate to a cover story, as well as to buy ads on pages that offer readers TV recommendations. Such edit-ad integration runs afoul of guidelines laid down by the American Society of Magazine Editors. But ASME is already looking into revising these rules because of the increasing popularity of shopping magazines.

Inside TV is targeted at television watching young women and will include heavy doses of celebrity chatter, along with beauty, fashion, and program information. Women, on average, watch nearly five hours of television a day. The mother ship, TV Guide, has had years of plunging newsstand sales. Still, total circulation has remained at about 9 million for the past couple of years. Inside TV is hoping for a newsstand circulation of 1 million.

The editor of Inside TV, Steve LeGreice, was the launch editor of Bauer’s In Touch, a fast-selling celebrity weekly. Mr. LeGreice is English, and product pop-ups on editorial pages are an accepted practice on his home turf.

“It’s the wave of the future,” he said. “From the consumer’s point of view, I don’t think there is any issue. It adds to the experience of the magazine.” Mr. Loughlin concurred: “All we are doing is making it clear what the quid pro quo is. In many categories, there are winks and nods. This gives us the opportunity to be more honest, not less.”

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Not just magazines constantly seek a young audience. Book publishers are propping up Hollywood’s obsession with youth. Nowadays producers can be more interested in optioning novels for or about teens than thrillers, the genre that has held the greatest appeal in the past.

Recently, two books about teens were snapped up. Paramount bought the rights to Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep,” a Random House novel about a Midwestern girl’s experiences at a posh New England prep school based on Groton. The book has been well received and made it onto both Publisher’s Weekly’s and the New York Times’ best-seller lists. Ms. Sittenfeld, a graduate of Groton, Stanford, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, won Seventeen magazine’s fiction-writing contest when she was 16.

There is even a product promotion that goes along with the book. Accessory designer Alyssa Tierney is offering a limited edition of the very preppy purple-and-green-ribbon belt that appears on the novel’s dust jacket. In case you or the preppy in your life are hankering for one, it’s available for purchase through www.atierney.com.

The other book that’s full of teen spirit is Jen Calonita’s “Secret of My Hollywood Life,” which has been purchased by the producer of “Legally Blonde,” Marc Platt. The Little, Brown novel is about a burned-out teen star who tries to pass as a normal high school girl. The book’s agent describes the story as a combination of “celebrity secrets” and “sweetness.” Ms. Calonita is an editor at Teen People and has written for Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, and Glamour. She’s interviewed a host of teen cover favorites including Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher, and Lindsay Lohan – who just might be right for the leading role.

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This week’s new magazines include VibeVixen, a for-girls-only version of Vibe, the 11-year-old magazine that celebrates hip-hop culture and the urban lifestyle. Vibe has always had a large female readership, but VibeVixen focuses primarily on beauty and fashion – and shopping, of course – with features on Kimora Lee Simmons, Halle Berry, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s makeup choices. Vibe’s editor in chief, Mimi Valdes, also edits VibeVixen.

The semiannual magazine was introduced at a packed party Thursday night at Frederic’s, which Mary J. Blige, Carlos Santana, Kevin Bacon, and Nicole Richie may or may not have attended. At least the party’s invitation told you – and the paparazzi – that they were among the invited guests.

Another magazine that is back on the newsstand is Savoy, out of Chicago. It is published by the founder of N’Digo, Hermene Hartman. N’Digo has the largest black newspaper circulation in America, with a weekly readership of 625,000.The magazine’s cover is a photo of Senator Obama and his wife shot by famed Chicago photographer Victor Skrebneski. It looks quite a bit like Vanity Fair’s January front picturing Governor Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, though Ms. Harman says she didn’t see the California couple’s cover shot until after the Savoy issue closed.

Savoy was originally published by New York-based Vanguard Media. Ms. Hartman and the relaunched magazine’s new editor, Monroe Anderson, think that that was one of its many problems. “We had a meeting in New York and people said, ‘Are you really going to publish from Chicago? Of course. R.R. Donnelly, [the printer] is here. Johnson [the publisher of Ebony] is here. Playboy is here. This is a big country. … It doesn’t start in New York or end in L.A.” So there.

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Every writer who ever got a bad review in the New York Times was amused last Sunday by A.J. Jacobs’s furious but funny essay “I Am Not a Jackass.” The piece – which itself was published in the New York Times – was his reaction to the negative coverage his work received in the Book Review from an extremely nasty reviewer. But as the blog Publisher’s Lunch noted, the joy of seeing Mr. Jacobs’ witty essay in print was spoiled by the Review’s smug editors’ note that appeared with it. In the commentary, the editors claim that the Book Review does take precautions about making assignments and “in most cases reviewers are forthright about volunteering information that might be compromising.”

I don’t know about that. When my book “Spin Sisters: How the Women of Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America” was published last year, it was pretty clear that it was a conservative book in which I took pot shots at the Clintons. Funny, the person who was picked to review the book was Emily Nussbaum, who at the time wrote for the Times, Slate, and the Nation, and whose mother is a Democratic fund-raiser and whose father, Bernard Nussbaum, was President Clinton’s White House counsel. Not exactly someone who might be sympathetic to my point of view in public – and still want to go home for a family dinner the same Sunday.