Peter Jennings, the urbane, Canadian-born broadcaster who delivered the news to Americans each night in five separate decades, died Sunday. He was 67. Jennings, who announced in April that he had lung cancer, died at his New York home, ABC News President David Westin said late Sunday.

The press is abuzz with stories about big companies moving dollars out of traditional advertising media and into product placements and other newer marketing methods. One expert after another is predicting that the ad industry as we know it has lost its way and is in decline. Stories about TiVo, buzz and the Internet are all the rage. But before everyone packs up their resumes and jumps ship, I think it's time for a more reasoned view of things--or at least one that gets us away from all of the negative hype and the doom and gloom. Let's start with …

As it does every Father's Day, Real Men Cook, a charity devoted to encouraging African-American men to stay involved with their families, held its annual street fair this June in about a dozen cities across the country. Nielsen Media Research's sudden interest in Real Men Cook - along with the $100,000 it says it spent to help sponsor the Father's Day event - underscores the efforts the company has undertaken to remake its image after an industry dispute turned into a public contretemps with racial and ethnic overtones.

In what some experts see as the first of many blows for big consumer magazines, BusinessWeek was found to have missed its rate base in 12-month period an average of 4.5 percent a week in a revised audit issued quietly last week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The development is likely to send shock waves across the industry because BW is one of the first major titles to report under new, tougher guidelines on paid circulation issued recently by the ABC, which is one of the major circulation monitoring agencies for daily newspapers and consumer magazines.

Procter & Gamble long ago split up its advertising, with Tide laundry detergent now handled by Saatchi & Saatchi, Bounce antistatic dryer sheets by Leo Burnett Toronto and Downy fabric softener by Grey Worldwide. But now the company has put the scent of Febreze, its household odor freshener for fabrics, into all three products. So which agency gets to trumpet that fact? All of them.

As advertisers increasingly explore ways to seamlessly blend their products with editorial content, some are coming dangerously close to breaching the time-honored separation between "Church and State."

Lee Iacocca's newest spot for Chrysler includes rap star Snoop Dogg, as the auto maker tries to reach out to a younger group of buyers. Iacocca, who frequently appeared in Chrysler commercials during his tenure as chairman from 1979 to 1992, returned to pitch the company's cars in July, hyping its offer to sell vehicles at the employee-discount price to the general public. The latest spot, which numerous media reports say should start Saturday, includes Iacocca and Snoop Dogg, whose hip-hop speaking manner in the spot seems to confuse Iacocca.

Few advertisers outside of drug companies and carmakers need to run fine print with their television ads. Then again, music network Fuse is not your typical advertiser, as its new campaign makes clear. In a spot sure to rile PETA, two juvenile delinquents are shown hooking up rabbits to parachutes and pitching them off the roof. The latest Fuse campaign - which carries the tagline "Amusing you in ways others can't" - is intended to court young, male viewers and is part of a back-to-school push that encompasses print, radio and outdoor, as well as street marketing.

First there were regular-size M&M's, then tinier ones. Now, the Masterfoods USA division of Mars is bringing out a supersize version, called Mega, with each milk chocolate or peanut piece about 55 percent larger than the equivalent standard-size M&M's. A marketing blitz that began yesterday, with a budget estimated at $10 million, presents Mega M&M's as "perfectly big." Humorous commercials, print and online ads compare Mega M&M's with imaginary versions as large as hubcaps to demonstrate that "you wouldn't want them any bigger."

Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist whose unmasking of a C.I.A. operative touched off an investigation about a possible leak, stalked off a live appearance on CNN yesterday afternoon after James Carville, the Democratic strategist, accused him of trying to make a particular point "to show these right wingers" that he had "backbone" and was "tough." About two hours later, a spokeswoman for CNN, Laurie Goldberg, released a statement saying that the network had "asked Mr. Novak to take some time off." Asked later in a telephone interview whether Mr. Novak was being suspended from his work at the Cable …