The luxury truck seems to lurch from the page of Ski magazine. It's a "surefooted Rover," explains the copy below it. The next few pages elaborate - with seven more invocations of the brand, seven Land Rover photos, and chunks of text that could be called paeans to a product.

"Well-crafted lines lend a rugged but cosmopolitan look," reads one line. Paragraphs tout the truck's technical specifications in arcane detail.

Why so much hyping of this one particular mode of conveyance in a feature story on Colorado travel?

Well, it could be that the freelancer who wrote this piece - and who also reviews cars for Ski - thought the Land Rover was an important part of his travel experience. (Efforts to reach the writer for comment were unsuccessful.) Or it could also be the latest case study in what some observers of the industry call a troubling trend: the peppering of magazine articles with product brand names.

"It's across the culture," says Peter Hart, media analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) in New York. "You're seeing these tendencies everywhere, whether it's product placement on a sitcom or in the news."

During the ad-sales slump of the early 1990s, a few consumer magazines faced lawsuits - and editors were fired - amid allegations that they blurred the line between editorial content and advertising.

In 1999, Times-Mirror Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times, cut a deal with the owners of the Staples Center to share ad revenue generated by a Times Sunday magazine that dedicated one issue to the arena.

"That was scandalous at the time," says Mr. Hart. "If it happened now, I don't know. I think the bar has been lowered."

Tolerance for mentioning specific products in a publication's articles has risen significantly in this fourth year of another ad slump, experts say, with product placement today spilling out of the entertainment realm and deeper into zones of supposed objectivity.

"They're failing to inform their readers, their viewers, about how these relationships really work," says Hart, who hadn't seen the June/July issue of Ski.

Any "implied endorsement" flouts the guidelines of the American Society of Magazine Editors, says Marlene Kahan, ASME's executive director. Though many editors work to hold the line, she and others say, marketers are turning up the pressure on publishers to get "added value."

"The more they can make advertising look like journalism, the better suited they are to sell their products," says Hart. "Those boundaries have steadily been getting fuzzier," he adds. "It's not clear anymore, which is exactly what advertisers want."

Readers, for their part, may be increasingly accustomed to publications in which the stories - and not just the ads - are meant to sell an image. Custom publishing - the production of periodicals with close ties to the firms that commission them - has come on strong in recent years.

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