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Well -- surprise! -- like the mirror-world objects from Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the bastardized rules are now crossing back into old media. "The Web has said ... you can integrate commerce and content," Sharples says, and Garden Escape shows "how that can be rebounded back into the print world as something new."

At first blush, Garden Escape looks like any gardening magazine. The cover mentions www.garden.com only as the Web site of "The ultimate Internet garden magazine"; it teases features but doesn't mention prices or sales. Jimerson and Sharples argue the line "Plus, thousands of tools, plants & gifts for your garden" is ample disclaimer. "If it was a catalog, we'd put that up on the front page," Jimerson says. "'This is a catalog; buy thousands of products.' You don't have to buy a darn thing in the magazine and still it's worth the six bucks."

What's really interesting is how otherwise forthright Garden Escape is about its intent. "We're proud of the products we sell," Jimerson's editor's column says, and prices and ordering information are prominent everywhere. To Garden.com, its business-edit synthesis is an asset to trumpet -- a win-win that allows editors and marketers to trade know-how. Suppose, Sharples says, "our head plant product manager comes across some totally unique specialty grower of a certain category of plants that we didn't have on the Web site and says ... 'We really want to sign them up as a supplier.' (The manager) goes to the editorial team and says, 'Do you think there's a story here that would interest gardeners?' 'Yeah, definitely, we could definitely feature that.' 'OK, well, let's ...' And that's how they make decisions in terms of what to add to the product line."

Jimerson maintains he's free to choose his topics: "I'm not going to tell you that I totally forget about the product line, because the goal is to help people be successful, but I never edit with the product line as my decision-making factor."

Of course, a magazine hawking its own wares is nothing new, particularly among shelter publications: Jimerson says he had particular experience working with sales at Meredith ("It's one of the reasons we hired him," Sharples says), where Better Homes and Gardens has long had the Family Shopping Service (which now sells online). BHG's spring 1999 Building Ideas magazine, for instance, includes a "Marketplace" section selling knickknacks "chosen especially" for readers; and of course Martha by Mail gladly sells Stewart acolytes everything but the sunlight (which no doubt she's working on). Garden Escape, Jimerson says, is "just going one step beyond what's already out there."

Moreover, Jimerson and Sharples say, users want commerce-content integration: They want information, resources, one-click convenience. Jimerson says he got the most complaints at BHG from readers who couldn't find plants the magazine mentioned. In effect, Garden.com says combining retail and editorial interests serves its reader-customers better and more accountably than a pure-play magazine would.

The thing is, Garden.com could be right. A traditional consumer magazine has one type of market-based quality control: If its advice sucks, you'll stop buying it. But Garden Escape's reader can stop buying it and the products. Who's to say marketers, with sales quotas to meet, won't put more shoe leather into their research than buck-a-word freelancers? Arguably, too, Garden Escape's conflict is at least transparent, compared with the everyday subtle skullduggery of tie-ins and flack deals that, say, the readers of beauty and fashion magazines wade through. "Everyone dances around this issue of church and state," Jimerson says, "but everyone in some way is selling something."

Still, we assume a magazine's cover price is what we pay to subsidize disinterested information. It may be in a retailer's best interests, say, to find me the best damn $16 terra-cotta basket-weave planter there is. But if I'd get good results using plastic pots -- or an old coffee can -- should I trust its magazine to tell me? Jimerson and Sharples say the proof will be in customer satisfaction, which they can only achieve through integrity (and Sharples argues online retailers are held to far higher standards regarding, say, privacy, than "terrestrial" businesses are). "I'm not telling them to grow roses some weird way just to sell them," Jimerson says. "Sure, if (a story about roses) sells, it helps me out, it helps the gardener out. But that's not why I'm personally putting together the story."

And you know what? I believe him. But it's clearly why his employer is having him put out a "magazine": The m-word has a respectability "catalog" doesn't. And if this were a petty semantic game, it wouldn't be so important to the retailer. For instance, Sharples says Garden Escape wants to sell more ads, not so much to make money -- it's more important for Garden.com "brand building" -- but because, well, magazines have ads, and "we really want to have this positioned on the newsstand as a magazine." Even if you ultimately make plain that you're selling something (and Garden Escape does, abundantly), a reader who accepts the designation will still believe he's not just reading a catalog. There's nothing wrong with Garden Escape as a catalog -- it's a great one, and quality for-pay catalogs are nothing new. But by changing our definition of "magazine," e-retailer/publishers will ultimately change the rules for readers of all kinds, on- and offline, making it acceptable for media to justify conflicts in the name of service.

That's dangerous even if they please their readers better. Look, it's not as if a strong, independent gardening mag would otherwise urge readers to let their land go fallow. But if Garden Escape is successful, it'll be joined by e-business-cum-magazines and vice versa in various fields, arguing, Perot-like, that straight-shooting businesspeople policed by an efficient market can serve the people best. Sharples, who is also the chairman of e-commerce association Shop.org, says, "Already a few of the people who came to our launch party last week have sent me e-mails saying, 'How can I get a magazine?'"

And why not? In 1997 I wrote in New York magazine about Bold Type, an online "literary magazine" that was actually a PR site for Bantam Doubleday Dell (now Random House); in a classic example of press-release journalism, the New York Times wrote up the site as a new lit mag, without any reference to the shill. That was an innocent time, 1997. You could put a catalog "magazine" online and nobody would call you on it because nobody understood what you were doing. In 1999 you can do the same thing -- even in print -- and nobody will call you on it because nobody gives a crap. Read any business magazine, read Newsweek: E-commerce, we've decided, is what the Web is for -- the deus ex machina to redeem the failures of content and fund our two-Lexus retirements at age 40.

As I write, the Dow is threatening to break 10,000. On CNBC a reporter stands weatherman-like in front of a board pointing out the stock rise of another "e-commerce and content" company. Ron Insana says we could witness "a historic edition of 'Street Signs'" this afternoon. A historic edition of "Street Signs." A solid citizen -- especially one who depends for his paycheck on the profitability of e-content -- feels like a bit of a hypocrite, stick-in-the-mud or traitor for pissing on this parade. What Garden.com says about Garden Escape is true. It's "not hoodwinking anybody." It's "not holding a gun to anyone's head." Garden.com, like many of us online, is just taking things "one step" beyond where they already are.

As Wile E. Coyote so instructively reminds us, if you take a step and don't feel yourself falling, why risk looking down?
SALON | March 16, 1999

James Poniewozik's Under the Covers appears every Tuesday in Media.