In late October, mediabistro.com hosted its third annual Women's Magazine Editor Dinner at The Four Seasons. Co-hosts Brandon Holley (Jane), Cindi Leive (Glamour), Isobel McKenzie-Price (All You), Janice Min (Us Weekly), Mandi Norwood (Shop Etc.), and Kate White (Cosmopolitan) were delightful and delivered the goods on the panel. During dinner, the 80 women's magazine editors (yes, men can be women's mag editors, too!) discussed everything from "How the Internet affects magazines' content" to "Magazines' celebrity addiction."

Question: I'm wondering about the role of publicists in how it's affected journalism and whether you feel the need to cater to what the publicists want, versus the desire too be truthful and accurate with what you see. This is probably drifted more to Janice, but to everyone else and how you think the publicists have sort of thrown it back to the editorial world?

Janice Min: I that one of the reasons Us succeeded was that it did stop being beholden to the whole publicity machine. That as a monthly you are, for better or worse, slaves to these people. When it comes to booking the covers. Because they have all the control over whether they are going to give you Lindsay or Cameron, and you know they can make all sorts of demands because you need them. For Us, we have the luxury of having cooperation or NOT having cooperation, and I think that, you know, we've definitely—it's interesting, the publicists have definitely turned around a lot on the whole weekly category. You know, I know when we worked at People you just couldn't get anyone to cooperate. They thought weeklies were just too icky to cooperate with. I think as the category's grown, publicists began to play ball. It's not so much necessarily that they think they're going to get a cover that's akin to a monthly cover, but they want to be able to have some role in controlling the perception of their clients.

A lot of them will go off the record with you to talk about a news story, a lot of them will give you a lot of background information. They might put the celebrity on the phone for 10 minutes to talk about a news event that happened to them if they want to help try to control it. Obviously, I think that we've seen how the world of celebrity has grown in so many ways. If somebody has a birthday party, it's probably paid for by a club who wants to have it mentioned in a weekly, because, you know, it gets so much press for them and the celebrity will carry a bag or wear an outfit that's paid for. I think the whole industry of celebrity and amount of money that can be made is so huge now that the immediacy of a weekly is important to the publicity machine in that way. But in terms of being beholden to them, I mean, we do plenty of new stories that if we know something is true and a publicist denies it, we will still do it.

More here.