This session examined what the enormous but often overlooked area of service journalism had in common with more traditional newspaper and broadcast journalism.

Jean LemMon, editor of Better Homes and Gardens, uses a different vocabulary to discuss her work, but in essence she shares many of the values with others forms of journalism.

Her commitment is first to the reader, not advertisers or fellow journalists. She operates on a "value system" that includes accuracy, balance, reflecting the diversity of audience and allegiance to a certain approach to home and garden maintenance.

She also acknowledges that adhering the all the values is becoming increasingly difficult in a changing marketplace. In her written text, which she did not have time to fully deliver, she remarked that if editors are choosing between two equal products, one an advertiser's and the other not, it would be a slap in the face to the advertiser if we chose a non-advertiser's product. That is not necessarily a value all her colleagues would share:

"Service journalism is a type of journalism that goes beyond the delivery of pure information. It is journalism that [is designed to lead to] action...Service journalism is action journalism. As such, it must include inspiration for the reader to want to do something, and then the editorial backup that equips the reader to actually go ahead and do it."

To succeed, "First, a service magazine has to know and has to care about its readers...The layout of a service magazine needs to be a clear road map to getting something done. It needs to be clean, easy to follow, and not something that gets in the way of the message. And the copy must be clear, accurate... There's never any talking down to our readers, even though our editors are the subject experts."

"In the past month there's been an awful lot of press on advertisers strong-arming editors and publishers. For your information, that is not fiction. It does happen...What happens when a magazine editor or publisher is asked to reveal his or her contents in advance? The advertiser, who might be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising in a publication, wants to make sure that his or her ad is placed in what he or she or the company considers an appropriate environment. What would be considered inappropriate would be a piece that perhaps put drugs in a favorable light; graphic sex; violence; perversion. Advertisers pay for their space, they have a right to go where they want, but it's the tactics they're using these days that seem to be a little different."

In response to an audience question she remarked, "Those magazines that deal with fashion and with makeup are particularly vulnerable. When you see a beautiful model, you accept the fact that you can credit Revlon with the makeup and you can credit someone with her clothes. But when they credit the scent she's wearing, you know that's a collusive effort."

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