[via a friend of Andre]

Amazon.com Under Fire for Sticking with Animal Fighters

Espresso OD: That’s hard core.

How a religion reporter was changed by the stories he covered.

You’re killing the planet. Yes, even you Geo Metro.

Lookie here, we’ve been up for under a week and already we made the pages of the Tennessean. Some feat! In a column by an unnamed 100 Broadway scribe, my brand new work blog gets some ink and a bit of snark:

Former blog producer Gilbert is talking again

Brittney Gilbert, the blog producer hired in 2005 by WKRN-TV Channel 2 to run a new site called NashvilleIsTalking.com and who very publicly resigned that post in June, announced on BrittneyGilbert.com on Thursday that she has a new gig writing a blog about magazines.

Gilbert, who took on a kind of celebrity (or notoriety) in the small circle of Nashville bloggers, will run BlogMagazine.com, a site that will “cover the magazine industry at large, news of brand-new or dying periodicals, hot content, trends in coverage, as well as covers and more.”

But reading through some of Gilbert’s debut posts on the site, one got the feeling that she’s not taking the same no-holds-barred approach of some of her peers, sites such as Jossip.com or Mediabistro.com.

One prominent item posted Wednesday, for example, heaped unabashed praise on a recent cover of Time magazine that basically pictured nothing more than part of a stone wall and a thick block of blue text. Other items cooed over similarly unremarkable features of various titles in much the same way — and mostly for those owned by Time Inc., one of the world’s largest magazine publishers.

Perhaps this has something to do with it: Magazine.com [sic], the Franklin-based magazine subscription service that hired Gilbert to start and run BlogMagazine.com, boasts on its Web site that Time Inc. is a major investor.

Ouch. And the funny part, to me at least, is that I barely knew of Time, Inc.’s investment in Magazines.com. Oh well, it’s a keen observation, if not a bit of a stretch.* Truth is, BlogMagazine will not be a shill site for any owners or investors of the company for whom I work. It is going to be a general interest site about magazines, with no real agenda at all. I hope to do interviews with B2B publishers (I’m looking at you, Rex.), start-up and anyone else in the industry who will let me throw dumb questions at them. I hope to be just as critical of Time-owned rags as I am of Hearst or Conde Nast produced-publications. Truth be told, I couldn’t tell you which publishing houses make which magazines. I’m pretty brand new to all this. What I will do, unapologetically, is link to our site and our products whenever possible. BlogMagazine is not just about increasing the profile of a growing e-commerce company, but about selling magazines. It is a distinctly commercial endeavor.

While I love sites like Jossip and Valleywag, I do hope to refrain from so much of the sarcasm and snark. It will be tough, but that is what my personal blog is for. Smarmy industry inside-jokes seem to be a great gig for those sites, but they’ve got that niche covered. I’m going to try to do something a little kinder, a bit more sincere. I may fail, but that is indeed my aim. But, that doesn’t mean I’m going to give a pass to Time, Inc.-run reads–that just ain’t the way I roll, and I think most people who know me know that.

Good for the Tennessean, I suppose, for keeping me on my toes, though. BlogMagazine, much like NashvilleIsTalking was when it began, is a work in progress. We’re not sure where we are headed, but you can be assured we will do so with transparency and good intentions.

*What’s that that Liz & Co. say about the difference between bloggers and journalists? That journalists always pick up the phone to call the subject of their pieces to get their side of the story before going to print? No such courtesy in this case.

CORRECTION: I mistakenly thought the article was penned by an unnamed writer. It was, instead, written By RYAN UNDERWOOD, who is now #1 with a bullet on my Shit List. Okay, not really, I don’t have a Shit List, because if I did it would be too long.

Karl Rove is resigning. Says he’s moving on to a retirement life of torturing kittens and eating babies.