A planned food magazine called Relish will let marketers buy brand mentions in recipes prepared by the editorial staff and buy product placement among staff-recommended kitchen and home gadgets.

Advertisers and media execs are scrambling to make sense of new, tougher circulation rules and their impact on past ad buys after an industry-wide crackdown on magazine publishers. The reaction among advertisers ranged from concern to outright anger after the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which monitors circulation figures, issued major changes that will affect scores of publications but declined to specify which ones.

NBC is beginning what may well be its most elaborate campaign ever to woo viewers to watch its series for the coming fall season. The multimillion-dollar campaign, which involves a big marketer, Mazda, and a big media company, Time Warner, also represents NBC's most extensive effort to use the firepower of branded entertainment in promoting a new-season lineup.

John S. Carroll, the editor of The Los Angeles Times, said yesterday that he was leaving the paper "for professional and personal reasons" and that Dean P. Baquet, the paper's managing editor, would take his place as top editor.

Carat Americas has been awarded the $60-million global media business for Tourism Australia and is the first time that account has chosen a single media services firm to handle all of its worldwide needs.

How hot is HBO's programming? So hot that people are willing to scale the side of a building to watch it on a huge TV screen. That's the message of HBO's newest billboard from the minds at BBDO, which began construction about two weeks ago on a building near Madison Square Garden.

Classic TV evergreens such as "The Munsters" and "Kojak" might soon be reincarnated into foreign-language productions as NBC Universal Television Distribution mines its vaults in search of suitable candidates for new international TV shows. The plan emerged Wednesday, when NBC Uni TV Distribution launched an original content unit that will partner with local media companies abroad to develop and create local programming in foreign territories.

Dozens of magazine and newspaper publishers can no longer count as paid circulation copies handled by two widely used distributors now under scrutiny for questionable practices. The Audit Bureau of Circulations, which verifies figures for the industry, said the ruling applies to more than 80 publications, mostly magazines, and that more will likely be affected when their audits are completed. A handful of business journals and newspapers will also take a hit.

Two months after being bumped from CNN's morning show, Bill Hemmer signed yesterday with rival Fox News Channel as a daytime anchor and occasional correspondent. Hemmer is the biggest name to jump from the Time Warner network to Rupert Murdoch's operation since Greta Van Susteren did so in 2002. The three-year deal is said to be worth more than $1 million a year at the outset.

They get flush turning TV shows into promotions -- and all you get are these lousy product placements. Beware: Television more and more is shill-o-vision, where commercial breaks still come and go but the commercials never end. Commercials for Sears products, which outfit ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." For Coke, with logo-inscribed glasses nursed by Simon and his comrades on Fox's "American Idol." For Clairol, when a contest to be "Herbal Essences Girl" pitted two pals against each other on an episode of the WB sitcom "What I Like About You." And this is only the start.