BusinessWeek editor-in-chief Stephen Adler provided the lunchtime entertainment at today's American Magazine Conference when he interviewed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. (Be her friend.)

The executive, battling a possible staff defection, attempted to explain how she saw the future of online advertising playing out. "My view is that people don't dislike ads," she said. "They dislike irrelevant, untargeted ads."

To this end, the much-reviled "new Facebook" is designed to have interactive ads. "It's a much cleaner interface. And we launched an ad product on the right, which has interactive properties. People can interact with it," the COO said. In a test campaign, MTV ran a video during its music awards and people could comment on the video. Those commends then went directly to the Newsfeed. "People were doing what they do with Facebook right in the ad," Sandberg said.

How does she feel about the millions of people protesting the redesign?

continued...

Earlier today, we skipped out of the American Magazine Conference for a bit to speak with Steve Proctor, one of the San Francisco Chronicle's deputy managing editors for an upcoming So What Do You Do? article. We'll save the bulk of the interview for the future, but wanted to bring you a brief hint of what's to come.

In light of today's stock market mini-meltdown, Proctor discusses how being on the West Coast is actually an advantage for reporting on the news:

"Even still, the world is mostly run from the East Coast. If you're covering the Presidential debates, most of them will be covered on East Coast time. That gives you more time to deal with the debate and offer a more analytical take on it. Obviously, Wall Street closes here at around 4:30 or so, so you have much more time to reflect and contact people about where they think the story is going. We'll often know before our final deadline what the Asian markets have done and we'll be able to include in a story about Wall Street how the Asian markets reacted 'this morning' to the news. So there are a number of advantages to being out here."

User-generated content was the topic on one of this afternoon's con-current panel discussion at the 2008 American Magazine Conference. Kevin McKean of Consumer Reports and ConsumerReports.org moderated the group which included Mitchell Fox, president and CEO, 8020 Media; Chris Johns, editor-in-chief, National Geographic; Susan Kane, editorial director and editor-in-chief, the Parenting Group; Edward Grinnan, editor-in-chief and vice president, Guideposts and Guideposts.com; and Alexandra Bandon, multimedia editor, This Old House.

Bandon, whose magazine put out an entire user-generated issue this June, spoke first. "We learned a lot about ourselves," she said, adding that despite not paying contributors for their content, "We spent pretty much the same amount of money, but we had to build a $40,000 Web site." This Old House hopes to put out another issue next year, and Bandon revealed that advertisers "got very excited about it when it was in their hands."

After the jump, more revelations from the other four panelists (in quick, easy bullet point form because I'm tired and I'm sure you're sick of reading).

continued...

Did you hear? FishbowlNY's at the American Magazine Conference. What panel did you enjoy the most?

Gawker: The Downsized Employee

Discover/Reality Base: Note to Media: They Give Nobel Prizes to Women These Days

Eat the Press: Colbert — And His Wife — Rock The New Yorker Fest

Politico: Is Cramer Responsible for Stock Advice?

Via Daily Intel comes word that, yes indeed, there is still time for this campaign to get stranger. According to the Chicago Sun-Times Sarah Palin may make her own appearance on this Thursday's SNL special playing, you guessed it!, Tina Fey circa her Amex commercials. Maybe Palin, during some of her "all of them" newspaper reading came across this Sunday's Week in Review piece about politicians surviving parody, in particular Hillary Clinton, and took it to heart. Whatever the inspiration, we suspect that in the end Fey will probably do a better Palin than Palin.

For the past few weeks rumors have abounded that The New Yorker was preparing a "hit piece" on Arianna Huffington. Since the term "hit piece" is not something we normally associate with The New Yorker we had our suspicions as to how hard-hitting it was actually going to be. Still, word on the street was that New Yorker scribe Lauren Collins had been doing some digging, so who knew!

Well turns out all the concern (anticipation?) was unnecessary. Collin's profile is a mostly flattering one (Huffington is "one of the Anglophone world's most nimble and ubiquitous communicators"), revealing very little about the woman behind the online media empire (full disclosure: we worked at HuffPo for a short time and continue to make intermittent appearances). So, the question on everyone's mind now appears to be, were there perhaps some things that Collins missed (like, is it strange there's no mention of Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan)?

continued...

Meanwhile, back in other news that would be big if it wasn't for the worldwide financial crisis and/or Sarah Fey Palin: You may recall how last Friday someone calling themselves "Johntw" posted a note on CNN's citizen journalism blog iReport ("Unedited. Unfiltered. News.") saying that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital due to a heart attack (this is not the first time Jobs' health has been falsely reported, back in August Bloomberg accidentally ran the Apple head's obituary). The report was picked up by multiple blogs before being denied by Apple and subsequently removed by CNN, though not before Apple stocks had tumbled nine percent in 12 minutes; that's the equivalent of $9 billion. Questions were immediately raised as to the identity of the blogger and whether he/she was a short-seller and the SEC is apparently investigating. Meanwhile, CNN has confirmed that the posting on iReport was "not vetted or reported by CNN journalists."

And the citizen journalist rears it head again! Remember the Sarah Palin fake pregnancy story? That, too, initially began as a anonymous post on Daily Kos. And we're all familiar with the case of Mayhill Fowler and her digital recorder, which rocked both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Leaving the discussion of the increased leverage the Internet gives to financial rumors for people who can speak to it more knowledgeably than us, there is the larger question of whether citizen journalism is a boon or a danger to the industry. Not to mention, how on earth did we all become so gullible!? To get a better sense we asked citizen journalism advocate Jay Rosen for his thoughts.

continued...

"Brain," New York's tribute to the Eliot Spitzer scandal, picked up three awards including "Cover of the Year" at this morning's third annual AMC cover contest. In total, Adam Moss' publication picked up five of the eight awards (including best fashion cover for New York Look).

Texas Monthly was another big winner, winning Best Celebrity cover for its Willie Nelson cover and Best Service cover for its BBQ issue.

Full list, with links to covers, after the jump.

continued...

According to futurist Paul Saffo, consulting associate professor, Stanford University, and distinguished visiting scholar, Stanford Media-X, there's an amazing amount of opportunity in the changing media landscape.

"We are on the midst of a fundamental change in the whole information industry," Saffo said. "Everything is media."

"There's a massive shift from information to media, but there's also a shift from mass to personal," he explained, citing the fact that more video cameras were sold in cell phones last year than on their own.

He believes that the Information Age is over and we are at the dawn of the Media Age. Magazine publishers are at the forefront of this change, but it is difficult to see where to go. "You're at ground zero of this revolution, and that's a hard place to get perspective," Saffo said.

Where can media companies look for new ideas?

continued...

In the first talk of the day at the 2008 American Magazine Conference, Myers Publishing LLC president Jack Myers moderated a panel featuring Bob Carrigan, CEO, IDG Communications; Ed Kelly, President & CEO, American Express Publishing Corporation, and Andy Sareyan, President, Better Homes and Gardens and EVP, Meredith Publishing Group. The group discussed how the model for magazines was changing and how their companies and publications were changing along with it.

"Go where the money is," Kelly said when talking about his company's forays into the non-print world. "Forty percent of my bottom line comes from non-magazine [sources]."

Carrigan, who now sees roughly 60 percent of United States revenue come from non-print sources, said IDG was forced to deal with the move away from magazines earlier than some other categories. "The tech category was hit fast and furious," he explained. "We were the canary in the coalmine if you will."

The three on stage agreed that digital in itself was not the solution. "We just put together a large deal that really led with digital," Sareyan said. "That's where we're finding success with digital. Not isolating it on its own."

So how do you get into the digital realm?

continued...

That was a fun weekend. Lots of Sarah Palin and Tina Fey. Also bailout packages that navigated the tricky waters of Congress all the way to the Oval Office where it was lickety-split signed by President Bush. However! A Monday morning reality check may be in order courtesy of the home page of the New York Times, which is currently running yet another graph. That's because the Dow has dipped below 10,000 for the first time in four years. The markets in Europe seem to be in some sort of free fall and Americans have stopped shopping. Not surprisingly there are some who believe this is all, at least in part, the media's fault.

Does this mean magazines are officially dead? Tina Brown, magazine editrix extraordinaire, has finally launched the long chattered about The Daily Beast (named after the paper in the Evelyn Waugh novel Scoop). What is the Beast? Well, for one, it's not another news aggregator, it "sifts, sorts, and curates."

It's a speedy, smart edit of the web from the merciless point of view of what interests the editors. The Daily Beast is the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist. It allows you to lead the conversation, rather than simply follow it.

continued...

At yesterday's opening of the 2008 American Magazine Conference, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi went on (and on and on) about her visions of the bailout in response to question from Christy Hefner.

We skipped the entire Week in Review this week, because after a week like last week we didn't feel like it was necessary to have it reinforced, on a Sunday morning, how serious the world is. Hooray Style section.

Though, actually, this pirate story was a nice relief.

The City section this week, however, was packed with good things: David Patrick Columbia; The demise of the corner back infestation? Did you know NYC's bridges are color-code? And this small, but somehow fitting tribute to Paul Newman.

Cry Me a River: Walking the Masters of the Universe through their life change.

Dante's inner circle of Hell, the 2.0 version.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Read This.

Craigslist's 'Casual Encounters' makes its Style Section debut.

Deep, deep in the Real Estate section the Wall St crisis rears its head.

A wedding by any other name? Nope.