TV Guide is dead. Long live TV Guide.It's the stuff media critics have been getting wrong since they were spilling ink on their spats. Radio was gonna kill newspapers, TV would do in both radio and movies, and the Internet would finally deliver a death blow to newspapers, magazines, radio, movies, TV, CDs, staple removers, and Wite-Out. And yet all those things -- and TV Guide -- are still around.

Anyone who has ever watched PBS knows the call letters WQED. Pittsburgh's public TV station is shorthand for TV excellence -- and it extends its mission to entertain and inform hometown viewers in print with Pittsburgh. The snappy regional pub, which reaches nearly 300,000 monthly, chronicles an exciting, urbane city -- one I never knew growing up.

It's late August, time when the mail guy needs a forklift to deliver the September issues of women's fashion mags. InStyle and Lucky, the two nontraditional young babes in this category, are no exception; both sport a seasonally chubby look. Though the two pubs were begun with different formulas -- InStyle, in 1993, with a focus on celebrity fashion; Lucky, in 2001, as a shopping magalog -- each has evolved to share traits of the other. So how do the two compare now?

After a lovely birthday/vacation spent relaxing in the Florida Keys, even a flight delay couldn't bring me down. Off I headed to see what the Ft. Lauderdale airport newsstand might offer in the way of distraction. There's nothing like spending the better part of a week wearing next to nothing to make you start to think twice about what you are stuffing in your pie hole, so Clean Eating immediately caught my attention. It struck me as more "healthy" than "diet," which was definitely a turn-on. I've done enough Scarsdale/Atkins/South Beach for one lifetime, thank you very much.

Woman's Day takes as its motto: "live well every day." In my book, that covers health, money, work, family and food, and according to an expert source -- my mother -- Woman's Day fills the bill. She is a huge fan of its clean cover, concise tips and wide appeal, insisting it speaks to young careerists and grandmothers alike. How would she sum it up? "Trustworthy." And I concur.

Can Rodale, a magazine publisher best known as the kingdom of crunchy, fitness-oriented titles like Prevention and Men's Health, publish a men's magazine as literate and stylish as Esquire or GQ? That's what Best Life seems to be shooting for -- and hitting the mark more often than not.

I was thrown for a loop recently when my sister told me my great-niece, who just celebrated her 6th birthday, doesn't have any magazine subscriptions. Furthermore, she isn't really reading much. How can this be? By age 6, my mother was taking me to the library once a week to load up. And that was to satiate me after I'd already devoured Highlights, Jack & Jill and yes, even her Better Homes & Gardens. Great-Auntie to the rescue, I am going to remedy this situation, of course. But with what?