T A B L E_.T A L K

If you're a habitual PBS listener, check out the This American Life Chat Board live and cooking in Table Talk

---------------Strange fruit

Garden Escape is a new publication grown from the fertile soil of Garden.com. You might call it a catalog; they call it the ultimate service magazine. What if they're right?

BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Potatoes -- don't get Doug Jimerson started on potatoes. The editor in chief of e-commerce site Garden.com is waxing lyrical about a feature on potatoes about to go live. Tricked up with image maps, recipes and color photos, he says, it makes potatoes "look exciting." It brings alive "the whole potato experience."

Garden.com's multimedia spuds gallery is an example of the creative potential Jimerson says lured him three years ago from Meredith Publications, where for about 20 years he edited Better Homes and Gardens and associated publications. Not only does the site offer top-drawer gardening writing and photography, Garden.com users can look up their gardening zones by ZIP code, use garden-planner software and chat with experts. Numerous articles hail the site as a premier online gardening resource.

But now, curiously, Jimerson's become a print magazine editor again -- depending how you define "magazine." On March 8 Garden.com delivered the handsome, 122-page Garden Escape premiere issue to gardening centers, Home Depots, bookstores and newsstands. Produced with Primedia (publisher of New York and Seventeen) the $5.95 quarterly includes timely articles on geraniums and container gardening, a clean, modish design reminiscent of Martha Stewart Living and lovely color photos of delphiniums, treillages and voluptuous heirloom tomatoes. Virtually all of which, down to the last hand hoe, are accompanied by order numbers and prices and are ready for purchase from Garden.com's 15,000-item collection.

Garden.com calls Garden Escape "the first print magazine to be created by an electronic-commerce company." Now if you tax your memory, you might recall when publications exclusively devoted to selling a single retailer's product were called by another name. But in the age of new business paradigms, the hip e-tailer does not traffic in anything so passé as a "catalog." Instead we have "seamless integration of commerce and content," as Garden.com CEO Cliff Sharples proudly described the periodical in the Feb. 22 Advertising Age Interactive Daily. How seamless? An October Garden.com press release from PR News Media seeking "feature and news items" from industry people for the Web magazine clearly connects online editorial items and sales: "Another opportunity with Garden.com is to get products listed on the site," the release says. "The catch here is that (Jimerson) won't promote products he doesn't sell."

We've heard how online, the rules on business-editorial fraternization are up for grabs. We've accepted alliances between online publications and retailers, as in the "Buy This Book" links at Salon (which includes Garden.com in its Emporium Annex) and at countless Web magazines and newspapers; retailers like Amazon.com have cut out the middleman, producing their own reviews and features; portal sites sell placements in search results; and in a flurry of deals and alliances -- USA and Lycos, NBC (fresh from direct-marketing "The '60s" soundtrack) and shopping channel Value Vision -- broadcasters are trying to become retailers and retailers are trying to become broadcasters and Web sites are trying to become both.

N E X T_ P A G E | Service, service everywhere