AdAge reports that Sears is pushing for product placement within magazine editorial. (The image is from CNN.)

To me, this makes them a magazine hospice.

A hospice is where people go when they are terminally ill. A business hospice is where you dispose of your final, key assets before filing bankruptcy and leaving your creditors with nothing.

The only real asset a journalism enterprise has is its credibility, a trust between the editors and the readers. Break that, and you are truly bankrupt.

This is what "product placement" within editorial pages does, it kills credibility.

I'm not just saying this as a journalist. I'm speaking from personal experience.

How many big computer magazines are there? None.

Why? It's because they all sold out their readers, destroyed their credibility by becoming shills for their big advertisers. When hard times came there was nothing they could offer their readers worth paying for, so of course they died.

The fact is that the magazine industry, as it was once constituted, is dying. I say this with sorrow. I was a "magazine major" at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, class of 1978. Costs are killing the industry -- the cost of paper, of printing, of mailing.

But there are still some success stories, and all of them are based heavily on the credibility they have earned with readers, credibility that allows them to charge real money for the product. The New Yorker has credibility. Chris Kimball's Cook's Illustrated has credibility. Consumer Reports has credibility.

Magazines that lack credibility deserve to die. They should die. Sears, and other companies that demand "product placement" in editorial, help them on their way by stripping the last of their credibility, leaving dry husks behind. The company is doing us all a service. When you see a big Sears buy in a magazine, know that the editorial of that magazine has been sold, too. You won't have to be told, however. You'll sense it, the way you sense the coming loss of a loved one, in the hospice, when it's the last time you'll see them.

See Sears, say farewell.