• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, October 17, 2005

(Warning: parody ahead.) Reacting to a Starcom USA survey that found that 65 percent of consumers believe that advertisers pay for editorial mentions in magazines, the American Society of Magazine Editors division of the Magazine Publishers of America lifted all restrictions on the separation of church and state.

"Thank God," said ASME Executive Director Marlene Kahan in a hastily written press release. "Nobody was ever sure if church was sales, or editorial was. And the whole thing sounded like some medieval European civics lesson, rather than anything to do with magazine advertising."

"I think the tipping point was when The New Yorker, who someone--no one can ever recall--said was the best magazine in the world, thought that Target was a good match for its snooty audience. Like New Yorker readers would ever be caught dead in a Target store!" said Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek and president of ASME.

"Don't blame us," said Louis Cona, The New Yorker's publisher. "Selling a magazine page is harder than getting James Brady to stop talking about the Marines. There's not a publisher in the country today that would turn down the chance to sell out an entire issue, even if the readers didn't have a clue what the ads were about. A couple more of those and we might make budget this quarter!"

GM moved quickly to buy up all the editorial and ad pages in the next 26 issues of TIME, Forbes, and Vanity Fair. "It's about time," said a source I'm just making up because it's easier than finding a real person to quote. "Now we don't have to argue about unfair coverage anymore. Our PR guys will just write stories the way we want consumers to read them."

Coincidently, the MPA issued a report that ad spending in magazines was projected to grow by 4,367 percent in the next quarter. "It's all about wantedness," said an MPA statement. "We have said all along that people who read magazines really want them, or read the ads... or something... but it's all in that big study, the one that if you read it you could win a cruise. Although I think that boat already sailed, let me check my datebook."

"This really takes a lot of pressure off us," said an editor at a really big and important magazine who doesn't want to be named, since he probably doesn't exist. "The ad guys were always 'just dropping by' my office trying to get us to put their clients in our stories or dumb down stories that mentioned their accounts in a bad way. Now, who gives a shit? We'll just let them edit our stories and knock off at noon on Fridays."

"This is so cool," said an unnamed sales rep at a niche magazine that serves such a tiny audience that nobody ever paid it much mind. "A week ago I couldn't get a meeting with a media buyer unless I dropped a grand at one of the restaurants in the Time Warner Building. Now I can't get them off the phone. ASME should have done this years ago! I'd probably be a publisher by now."