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Viacom Incorporated’s co-president, Leslie Moonves, who runs CBS, has declared that product placement “is becoming more and more relevant to every television show.” Expect a “quantum leap” in placement in the upcoming fall season, he said. Magazine executives are watching this trend closely, especially since the advertising page count for the magazine industry in 2004 dropped to below 1998 levels.The Toyota Motor Corporation recently asked three major magazine publishers to explore the idea of “product integration,” an advertising technique now accepted in movies and increasingly on television. And the American Society of Magazine Editors is drafting new guidelines to clarify and acknowledge the changes in the church-and-state relationship between magazines and their advertisers. Many editors believe the current guidelines are both unrealistic and confusing.Of course, because so many magazines already feature advertisers’ products prominently on their editorial pages, the line between editorial and advertising is already blurred. Magazines like Lucky and Shop seem to be nothing but advertisers’ products. But there’s a difference: It is the editors who pick the products to be featured, not the publisher or advertising director, and the publication receives nothing from the advertisers for the mention except lots of goodwill.This, in its own way, can be a valuable commodity. For example, beauty advertisers tend to count up editorial mentions and consider these mentions when developing an advertising schedule. And, yes, publications who don’t give enough credits can be dropped off the list.At a recent meeting of the Association of National Advertisers’ Print Advertising Forum in New York, Mark Whitaker, editor in chief of Newsweek and ASME’s president, said he hoped that new guidelines will be edited down to “11 or 12 commandments.” Paul Woolmington, CEO of the Media Kitchen, a communications company, predicted that the magazine industry would embrace within three to five years the same kind of “product placement” common on television.At the same meeting, Martha Nelson, managing editor of People, described an example of product placement that both she and her readers liked. To promote a recent Elvis special, CBS placed in copies of the magazine an audio microchip that played a song sung by the King. “You opened the magazine and got Elvis,” Ms. Nelson said. She said she received lots of positive phone calls. “They weren’t calling me to say, ‘Hey, great cover story!'”***So what’s your favorite magazine? The editors at the Chicago Tribune’s Tempo section put together their list of America’s 50 best magazines. This included the usual suspects: Vanity Fair, National Geographic, and the New Yorker. But there were also some regional favorites such as Lincoln Lore and Lake Superior Magazine. (Lincoln Lore, published by the Lincoln Museum, in Fort Wayne, Ind., is all Lincoln, all the time, and has been published for the past 76 years: That’s 1,880 issues devoted to the man most historians believe was our greatest president.Tribune staffers didn’t ignore the little known or unusual. Other magazines that struck their fancy included Whole Dog Journal, which is an all-around mix of training tips and not only doesn’t accept product placement but has no advertisements at all. Another that made the list was Twins – which is about, yes, twins. There’s also Birds & Blooms (flower gardens and feathered friends), Shambhala Sun (Buddhism and meditation), and Armchair General, which is just a year old. In the current issue, readers can restrategize the Battle of Ai and pretend they are Joshua contending with the Canaanites.Who says there isn’t a magazine for everyone? If you really want to tell me about your favorite offbeat magazine and why everyone else should know about it, e-mail me at the address below.***A most unusual book by a most unusual woman was published last week. The author is Ruth Gruber, who was born in 1911, and the book is her Ph.D. thesis, “Virginia Woolf: A Study,” originally published in 1935 by the Tauchnitz Press in Leipzig. This 70th-anniversary edition of the dissertation, now published by Carroll & Graf as “Virginia Woolf: The Will To Create as a Woman,” is the first time the book has been published in the United States.Ms. Gruber, born in Brooklyn, earned her Ph. D. from Cologne University at age 20. She was asked to write her thesis on Woolf by her German professors. “Virginia Woolf’s books were not very well known at the time,” she recalled. “They felt because I was English-speaking I would be the right person to write about her work.”Jane Marcus, a professor of English at CUNY and an expert on Woolf, has heaped praised on Miss Gruber’s youthful effort. “The recovery of this brilliant book demands an instant rewriting of literary history,” she writes. “For now we know that Virginia Woolf’s work found the critic she deserved in a 19-year-old Brooklyn Jewish girl.” She has also declared Ms. Gruber’s work “a masterpiece of feminist criticism to be put on the shelf next to ‘A Room of One’s Own.'”Ms. Gruber went on to become an author, foreign correspondent, and photographer. Perhaps her most famous deed was escorting 1,000 Holocaust survivors from Italy to America in 1944. She wrote about the experience in “Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America,” which was recently made into a television miniseries.At 94 Ms. Gruber is not resting on her laurels. She is working on two new books. One, a collection of her photographs, will be published next year by Schocken Books. There is also the third volume of her autobiography on the way. The first was “Ahead of My Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent,” also published by Carroll & Graf; the second is “Inside of Time: From Alaska to Israel”; the third will be titled “In Spite of Time: How to Live at 93.” Her sound advice: “Proper diet, daily exercise, never, never retire, keep your social life going, and do everything from your heart!”

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